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Lake-Lehman math instructor's formula for teaching yields success

By MARK GUYDISH markg@leader.net Their words linger for a lifetime, their vision broadens how you see things long after you last saw them. A good teacher teaches forever. This is one in a series of profiles of teachers dubbed "most influential by Times Leader "Best & Brightest" scholarship winners this year.

LEHMAN TWP. - Mimi Koch keeps a secret in her classroom closet - and a few in the cabinets. If you can get her to stop scrawling equations long enough to chat, they may be revealed.

She'll slip a nearly life-sized cutout photograph of herself from behind a door. She'll run a video of a girl dressed as Mimi Koch, go-go dancer. She'll show you the computerized "commercial" that morphs math books into a mosaic of her face.

"The nice thing about teaching," Koch will tell you, "is it's all new every year ... " She pauses, then adds, "for better or worse."

Visitors who see these props and videos - from student stage shows - might figure they demonstrate why the Lake-Lehman School District educator was named most influential teacher by John Mishanski, one of this year's Times Leader Best & Brightest scholarship winners. Obviously, Koch connects with kids, and can take kidding.

Maybe that's part of her secret. But listen to her explain logarithms as effortlessly as most folks pour pancake syrup and another reason emerges: Koch makes calculus sound almost appetizing.

It's not in the numbers. Those are as obtuse as ever - "Log sub-seven N equals two-thirds log sub-seven eight," was one recent blackboard formula.

It's in her voice. With a hint of a crackle accenting a delivery that sounds like part wise aunt and part old friend, she makes the math sound almost folksy.

That complicated "two-thirds" in the equation may look imposing, she concedes, but there's a simple solution.

"Just move it," she tells them, as though discussing a chair that's in the way.

She uses the same easy style when recalling - or in some cases, failing to recall - how she got into teaching.

"It's so long ago I don't remember," the Pittsburgh native said. "I think I was just looking for a job. I was a math major and the jobs were in teaching."

Similarly, she drifted into math from pre-medicine while in college. "I think I just liked math," Koch said. "I decided I didn't want to be a doctor."

After teaching six years in Illinois and another six at Wilkes University, she settled at Lake-Lehman 15 years ago. She teaches pre-calculus and advanced-placement calculus - and that, she reckons, adds up to why she looks like such a good educator.

"You're teaching highly motivated kids," Koch said. "I have 11 seniors who scored over 700 in the SATs in math, one with a perfect 800 and probably another 12 or 14 who scored between 650 and 700."

She gets almost wistful about the crowd she has been teaching for the last two years. Mishanski won the annual Wilkes University Math Contest this year and another student won last year.

"I never will see a group like this again," Koch said.

Mishanski also won a computer programming contest at the university. That's scant surprise. He wrote the program that makes thousands of math book covers appear, shrink and form Koch's face as part of a fake commercial run during a student game of Jeopardy which, incidentally, he organized.

Koch is proud of the commercial, and the video of another student dancing in a cage with a sign above it that reads "Koch Live." She laughs when she talks about how the students mounted the cutout of her onto a remote-control car so it could zip around a stage.

"You have to have a sense of humor and you have to be willing to learn from the kids," she said.

It's advice she adhered to closely as her field changed with the introduction of complicated calculators - tools the students routinely master more readily than most faculty. "When I want to learn how to do something on the calculator, it's the kids who will tell me."

But there are things going on here that no mere calculator can compute. At the end of that commercial in which math books form Koch's face, Mishanski put a simple theorem that may epitomize this and other exceptional classrooms good teachers create:

"The sum is greater than its parts."

Mark Guydish , a Times Leader staff writer, may be reached at 829-7161.

TIMES LEADER STAFF PHOTO/DON CAREY

(koch 2 (environment shot) )

Lake-Lehman educator Mimi Koch explains a problem in a pre-calculus class that included, this day, the student who named her his 'most influential teacher.'

(koch 1, (mug) )

Mimi Koch believes math teaching includes listening to kids. 'You've got to take their lead.'

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