By Kayla Del Rosario
Jim LaFrance is an IB Math and ASB teacher at Montgomery High School, and was recently selected as the April 2021 Santa Rosa City Schools Teacher of the Month. He teaches senior students calculus and junior and senior students statistics and trigonometry; he also teaches the student government class on campus and works with the student officers and other ASB students to organize events like dances and rallies. LaFrance spent 8 years at Elsie Allen, and this year is his 18th year teaching at Montgomery. Before that, he also spent time as an intern in San Jose, and did his student teaching in Vacaville.
LaFrance first became interested in teaching because his parents, all of their friends, and his uncle were teachers; he says, “I grew up in a teacher family.” He loved the idea of enjoying the same flexible lifestyle that his parents had. “We were able to take vacations together, we were able to camp,” he says. “I thought, this is a pretty cool lifestyle. We’re not going to be rich, but we’re going to be rich in time. My dad always said, ‘Teaching is one of the best family jobs, because you’re on the same schedule as your family.’” And, even as a student in high school, he enjoyed working and interacting with children, saying, “I’ve always liked kids. I always gravitated [toward them]. Even in high school, if there were little kids around, I would engage them. I wasn’t a babysitter or anything like that, but if we got into a group of kids, I would engage the little kids, and I liked it.”
He went into college planning to become a teacher, and when he became an intern at a summer math program, he was further convinced that he wanted a career in teaching. He would definitely become a teacher again if he had to repeat college, but says that he might choose a slightly different path and become an economics and government teacher instead of a math teacher because he loves statistics and enjoys discussing the application of math in the real-world settings of the economy and governments around the world.
When LaFrance first started to run his own classroom, he wanted to mimic the teaching style of his favorite math teacher in high school, who arranged his students’ desks in rows, and made them sit quietly during class with no one talking. He realized quickly that he was never going to be that type of teacher. “One, it wasn’t going to work. And I wasn’t even that kind of person. I didn’t want my kids to sit quietly in rows and not talk. I wanted that engagement . . . I realized really quickly that I had to be my own person, and I couldn’t be my favorite teacher. That wasn’t who I was, and that wasn’t what my students needed . . . Whatever my style or my philosophy was, it needed to become my own. It couldn’t be somebody else’s . . . I had to be true to myself, and I had to discover what that truth was.”
When asked what his teaching style was, LaFrance said that fundamentals of the math he teaches, like calculus, have remained relatively constant over the years. However, each year, what students bring to the table has changed slightly, and so have the types of questions that teachers ask their students and how they try to engage them. For LaFrance, what makes teaching fun “is to try to tap into what the feeling is in the classroom, trying to figure out what stuff is going to engage the students that [he has] in front of [him], what little jokes, what little memories, what little things that are going to work like this.” For him, teaching is all about interacting with his students, and engaging with them as people. He uses what he calls micro-interactions in his teaching, and says they are “little small interactions that try to make your class a lively place, that try to make the students realize you see them, that you’re teaching them. I’m not teaching a subject, I’m teaching a student that subject.” What he enjoys most about teaching is the personal interactions with his students, saying simply, “The students are the best part.”
His goal isn’t necessarily to teach his students to memorize every concept in calculus perfectly. Instead, he calls calculus (and his other subjects) “a vehicle for me to engage with [my students] and to try to bring the best out of them, and to try to make them reach higher than they thought they could reach--to try make them learn a harder concept than they thought” they could. “My philosophy is to get [my students] excited about [the fact that they] get to learn this stuff . . . [and] to try to get [my students] to realize that you just want to keep learning, you want to keep challenging yourself. I don’t want to just turn on the TV and watch TV and be entertained . . . I want to be involved in the entertainment. I want to continue to grow myself personally and professionally, and I want to encourage my students to see that.”
LaFrance wants his students to leave his class knowing two things. The first, he says, is “I want my students to come away [from my class] thinking that they can learn anything when they apply themselves . . . Doesn’t mean you’re always going to be experts, but you can absolutely learn anything.” And the second thing “I would hope [my students] would learn is that their math teacher cared about them as people. Not only do I want you to learn and know that you can learn anything, but I want you to walk away feeling like, ‘Yeah, you know, that wasn’t my easiest class, that wasn’t my best class, but Mr. LaFrance tried his best to make it doable and engaging, and I knew he cared about us.’” Basically, he wants his students to know, “I was rooting for you all along.” He also never wants his students to believe that he doesn’t care about them. Even if he butts heads with a student, he says that means he cares about that student because he tries to teach them instead of being indifferent. He lets students know if what they’re doing doesn’t work for him because he cares. LaFrance says that he loves to know about his students as people outside of the classroom as well: he enjoys watching them “play sports. And I love to watch them act, and sing, and see that, and see the whole student--everything that you guys bring to the table.”
Despite his love of teaching and his holistic approach to learning, LaFrance, like many other teachers, has found teaching during a pandemic extremely difficult. He says this year on distance learning has been difficult for him because “I’m interacting with a computer. In some classes, I have no one’s face but my own, so I’m sitting there, looking at myself, talking to myself . . . You’re a human being; you need someone to talk to. My favorite part [of teaching] is my students, because that’s the fun part.” LaFrance says that for teaching, the pandemic presents “the challenges of not only delivering the content that I have in my classroom to a virtual format—which is hard—and adjusting to how I’m going to have to teach simultaneously with the technology. No question, that’s hard. But that’s something that I could figure out. But it has been so unfulfilling to have a lack of regular engagement with people while sitting at my house. And I think that’s the hardest thing. You know, for so many students just to log into the computer, have their screen off, have their mic on mute, not ask a question . . . it feels so purposeless.” It saddens him that he hasn’t gotten to know many of the students in his classes because he’s never taught them before, and he has no chance to interact with them over Zoom because they don’t turn on their videos or participate. “I have not been able to figure out how to build class culture in a virtual environment with students that I don’t know.”
However, he’s excited to finish up the school year in hybrid learning. “I’m looking forward to it because I’m going to have students in the classroom. On the other hand, I think it’s going to be interesting because some classes only have four students in them . . . I think the students that want to learn, that want more support, are going to be able to get that . . . I’m definitely looking forward to seeing more students, and I’m looking forward to trying to make the classroom experience with students a meaningful one. I’m hoping that students feel like being in the classroom was worth it.”
I would like to add that as one of LaFrance’s math students, I can attest to the fact that he is an incredible teacher who is invested in teaching and cares deeply about each and every one of his students. This award is well deserved.