About Kay Toliver

Kay Toliver is a Presidential, Disney and Kilby Award-winning teacher who has been teaching at East Harlem Tech/PS 72 in New York City for the past 30 years. She was the subject of a Peabody Award-winning PBS documentary, Good Morning Miss Toliver, and is the host of the popular classroom television series, The Eddie Files, and its accompanying professional development series, The Kay Toliver Files.

Over the years, Ms. Toliver has developed unique class projects to encourage her students to apply their math and language skills to activities outside the classroom. The Math Trail began in 1992 as a way to get students out into the community to raise their appreciation of the things in their everyday environment and to help them to discover applications of math in the real world. As her students work on the Math Trail, Ms. Toliver finds that they begin to have a feeling of ownership for their community, a sense of pride in the things around them.

Ms. Toliver stresses application and thinking skills, holds open class discussions, and weaves language, history and art into the study of math. Her students keep daily journals. They write about what they learned in class, ideas about how to apply the concepts they study, or simply comments and observations about the classroom or even about her teaching. Through the journals, Ms. Toliver puts into practice her belief that the ability to express oneself in written English should be acquired hand in hand with mathematical ability.

"Mathematics is a subject in which we have to create thinkers not memorizers," Kay Toliver said in an article in Mothering magazine. "It is a subject that involves history and literature as well as numbers; it is more of a communication art than anything. If students are to become the thinkers of tomorrow, we can't just concentrate on getting them to pass tests. We have to show them the real reasons for learning various mathematical concepts. These reasons have to do with math being alive, related to every aspect of life. My goal is to allow students to discover this for themselves.

"I love to take my students out in the neighborhood to see how math is involved in just about everything they look at. They take pictures, draw maps and invent problems around the various types of math they see in the buildings, bridges, in the trade and commerce going on around them."

The National Math Trail allows Kay Toliver to utilize the Internet to share her ideas and provides a platform for teachers and students everywhere to participate with her.