Teacher Kelly Day infuses lessons from her travels into her teaching
Inside Kelly Day’s seventh-grade classroom at Westfield Middle School is a world map she purchased when she was in sixth grade. Scattered across the map are stars placed on countries she has visited since buying the atlas from Staples as a young girl in Crawfordsville.
“I have it in my room to inspire my future travelers,” she said. “If you have a dream, you have to preserve it.”
Day has traveled to New Zealand, Australia, Spain, France, England, Scotland, Mexico, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, Austria, Czech Republic, Canada, Jamaica, Monaco and Vatican City. She said her favorite culturally was Spain, where she taught English for a summer, but her favorite location was New Zealand, where she backpacked around for two months last summer.
“It’s a world’s mosaic. It’s the best parts of the world because it has volcanoes, mountains, beaches, tropical forests, and glaciers,” she said.
Day’s love for traveling came from her parents.
“They’d spend money on experiences, not things,” she said. “I now have friends from all over the world from traveling alone. I caught the traveling bug, and oh boy, is it an expensive disease.”
When school is out, so is Day – traveling to a new place.
“My philosophy is, I always do something,” she said. “We have freedom during the summer to enrich yourself to better your students.”
Meet Kelly Day
Age: 26
Hometown: Crawfordsville
Residence: Westfield
Education: Bachelor’s degree in math education from Indiana Wesleyan University and master’s degree in education administration from Purdue University.
Hobbies: I love the Olympics, traveling and cooking
Personal goal: “Visit 30 countries before I’m 30. I’m at 18 right not and this summer I’m going to add six more. I’m getting there.”
Personal motto: “If your goals don’t scare you, you aren’t pushing yourself enough. It’s a good thing because it’ll motivate you.”
Day was recently awarded a $10,000 Lilly Endowment Fellowship to pursue a broad range of imaginative projects designed to infuse her busy life with personal renewal, intellectual revitalization, and a healthy dose of fun.
“I feel incredibly blessed to have the opportunity because there is no way I could do this without the Lilly Foundation,” Day said. “I’ve been working and researching this since college and to further the research and go there means the world.”
She was chosen for her program, “The Asian Equation,” and will visit math classrooms in five top-performing Asian nations (Singapore/ Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, South Korea, China and possibly Japan); observe and talk with teachers to learn their depth of knowledge and teaching techniques; and experience Asian culture. Her program is based on her senior thesis in college: international achievement in mathematics.
“Asian countries outperform any other country in the world and teachers in Asia have a profound understanding of mathematics after they become teachers,” she said. “It’s going to be an amazing experience.”
Day is one of 100 educators selected from across the state to receive the award. The recipients of these fellowships are selected from a competitive pool of applicants; approximately 450 educators applied this year. She will visit Asia for six to eight weeks during the summer.
“My No. 1 passion is teaching. No. 2 is traveling which makes sense because when you travel, you’re a student,” she said. “It’s all about learning the culture and growing as much as possible.”
While she teaches math, Day said her experiences translate to the classroom when discussing percents, ratios and proportions with currency exchanges, economy and money lessons.
“They connect more easily with firsthand accounts,” she said. “Asia is also a major standard in seventh-grade social studies.”
Day has been teaching seventh grade at WMS for four years – her first job out of college.
“I can’t believe how blessed I am to teach here. I really truly love teaching. I come in every day and I can’t believe I’m doing this,” she said.
She credits her middle school math teacher, Karen Frodge, with her career in education. As a seventh-grade student, Day was placed in sixth-grade remedial math.
“She recognized that there was more to me than that. She really pushed me and that sparked the rest of my academic career. I worked really, really hard,” she said. “I really built a foundation so when I got to high school math was easy.”
By her junior her at Crawfordsville High School, Day had taken every math course available to students. She later graduated third in her class and magna cum lade at Indiana Wesleyan University.
“I love junior high math. If you can get a junior high student to like math and believe they can do it, it changes the rest of their life. If you wait until high school, it’s too late,” she said.
Day said her challenges with math at the same age as her students allow her to commiserate with the struggles of not comprehending concepts.
“I don’t let them say, ‘I don’t get it.’ It’s, ‘I don’t get it yet,’” she said. “I don’t think like a typical math person, and I don’t run my class like a typical math person. I share how I got through that stumbling block.”
Her teaching style is a hit with her students.
“I personally think she’s a great math teacher,” seventh-grader Ashlyn Bordigon said. “She interacts with us a lot.”
“I’ve had my best math grades ever in this class,” said seventh-grade student Michael Koza. “She explains it better than any other math teacher I’ve had before.”
