Professor George Reuter and the power of math education

If there’s one main thing SUNY Geneseo is known for in the larger lens of academia it would be, by far, the school’s ability to produce some of the country’s best teachers. Whether it be for English, art history, foreign languages, history, or any other subject, Geneseo’s education program continues to forge some of the strongest educators in the field, including the field of math, where Professor George Reuter focuses his attention. 

Having had a long and prosperous career in education before his time at Geneseo, Reuter has had a close connection with the campus as well. Having grown up in the Queens area, Reuter graduated from SUNY Geneseo in 1996. This was something of a transition as he had originally gone to high school for the humanities, but the seemingly unlikely transition came from a drought of math-focused students in his school.

“Supply and demand turned me from someone who was going to read the books to someone who was going to solve for ‘x,’” Reuter said. “If you go to a high school that specializes in the humanities, where does everybody struggle? That’s where I spent all my time tutoring. I honed the craft of teaching in mathematics, so it was a natural way to go for me. And in the 1990s, and still to today, this was and is the place to go if you were a teacher, with other emphases now of course.”

Having gotten his degree and masters right on campus, Reuter first moved into teaching in the Geneseo Central School, then to Canandaigua Academy, ultimately returning back to campus in 2013.

“I’ve come full circle, back to the land and the best education you’re ever going to get in the middle of a cow pasture.”

Having a similar change from teaching in public schools to a collegiate atmosphere as Professor D’Angelo in last week’s Invasion, Reuter agreed that there are many similarities between teaching at a secondary level to an academic level.

“In some ways there are great similarities,” he said. “You’re catching students in periods of transition, sure, [...] like in CALC 1, MATH 140, but in other respects college students are very different from middle school students. College students are self-regulating. You have to account for every minute of a lesson in middle school or chaos breaks out. [...] I can let college students be adults who are responsible for their own behavior, and I can lean a bit more on the fact that they’re paying to be here. But good teaching is good teaching, so some things transfer.” 

And when speaking about his own teaching techniques, Reuter not only has a number of techniques that he has found students respond well to, but is committed to sharing those techniques with the next generation of teachers. In that case, the math classes he teaches aren’t just about learning how the math works, but why it works: “Think of the cookie exercise here. That’s the serving size of a cookie. How many serving sizes do you get out of the cookie when it’s cut in pieces. You know? If you do the activity right, you learn how to divide fractions. But when you were in fifth grade, you learned to divide fractions because your teacher told you the rule: keep, change, flip. I want them to know why it does it. It wasn’t like a monk was walking through a monkery and the angelic light shone and all of a sudden, he knew keep, change, flip, the ‘Ah, now I know… Keep, change, flip. I shall write it with my quill.’ That’s not how that works.” This is in the face of a changing common core curriculum in New York, one that may require more effort, as Reuter says, because, “If teachers tend to teach in the way they were taught, then you have to reteach teachers in a way they aren’t familiar with and that’s uncomfortable for everyone. [...] It’s the line in the Incredibles 2: ‘How can they change math?! Math is math!’ It’s Mr. Incredible! And I hear him. I looked through the common core standards when they came out and said, ‘How can I teach this?’ Then you start brainstorming things and you come up with ways, it just takes thought.”

This fast-changing environment, as Reuter says, can be intimidating: “It’s a scary time to become a teacher.” Despite this, there’s an energy that comes from educators all around the nation about what does and doesn’t work.

When asked about a subject in his field of expertise that he’s most passionate about, Reuter immediately states, “I love talking to teachers about the science behind teaching, the research behind teaching, the craft of teaching. I love talking about the pedagogy of teaching. [...] They either scream enthusiasm or don’t, you can't teach it, but how we set our students up for success, the ‘Why did I stop and take a sip of water then during the lesson?’ [...] It is why the secondary education classes are a joy. It is why in the 1990s this was the place to go if you wanted to be a great teacher, and it still is.”

Reuter has firsthand experience seeing what future teachers from SUNY Geneseo look like, act like, teach like, all of which reinforces these high standards.

“I supervise student teachers in the field, I drive to local schools and watch them teach children,” Reuter said. “They are phenomenal. They are absolutely top-shelf, first-class, phenomenal. I love to sit down with them and ask, ‘Well, why’d you do that? How could this have been phrased differently? How can I help set you up for success? [...] This campus produces amazing secondary educators, period full-stop.”

While the future of education may seem grim at points, let Professor Reuter’s experience serve as a beacon of positivity and evidence that SUNY Geneseo’s education program is giving the best of the best to the field, aiming for a brighter future.