When Cate Guimaraes sees University of Hawaii freshman shooting guard Brandon Jawato knock down a corner 3-pointer, she sees more than just a sweet shooting stroke.
She sees the intersection of theory and application.
She sees pedagogical opportunity.
She sees math in action.
"It fuels my fire," says Guimaraes, 33, a first-year math teacher at St. Andrew’s Priory. "I’m not the most innovative teacher in the world, but when I have a chance to bring the real world into my lessons, I’m happy to do it."
What that has meant for the girls in Guimaraes’ Algebra I class this year is a crash course in Division I hoops and a few baby steps in the direction of Bill James-style sabermetric prognostication.
Guimaraes, who worked as a tutor for UH athletes shortly after arriving in Hawaii two years ago, had each of her students select a player from this season’s UH men’s basketball team. She then took her class on a field trip to watch the Warriors’ 71-66 win over North Dakota on Nov. 20.
The girls, several of whom are involved in sports themselves, kept track of their player’s points, rebounds, free throws made and other statistics. Later they compared the results with those from a loss against Illinois four days earlier.
The immediate goal was to see what they could theoretically project about their player’s performance heading foward, acknowledging of course the unreliability of the sample size. The real goal, Guimaraes says, was to show the girls how math works in the real world and how their attention and engagement can empower them to unlock complex ideas and make them personal.
Guimaraes’ teaching philosophy is informed by the far-flung experiences she’s been able to accumulate over her relatively short career.
Guimaraes grew up in New York and graduated from Boston University. She spent her first years out of college working with AmeriCorps, through which she gained experience as a teacher working with children from lower-income families.
She affirmed her love of teaching with a year teaching English in France and another six teaching math in one of the most economically depressed areas of the Bronx.
Along the way, Guimaraes became an expert in linking classroom lessons with the realities of life outside the school gates — and beyond. While in New York, Guimaraes raised funds to take her students on a field trip to her alma mater, just so they could get a vision of life beyond high school and beyond the boundaries of their immediate neighborhood.
"One of my students was a couple of years older than his grade level," Guimaraes remembers. "At one point he came up to me and said, ‘I think I want to go here.’"
Such moments, Guimaraes says, are the reason she does what she does.
"It’s such a cliché, but I love it when I can create a spark in a student," she says. "Those ‘aha’ moments are what I live for."
