{"id":941,"date":"2018-03-15T15:33:57","date_gmt":"2018-03-15T19:33:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/coe\/?p=941"},"modified":"2018-03-20T11:36:25","modified_gmt":"2018-03-20T15:36:25","slug":"chasing-windmills","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/coe\/2018\/03\/15\/chasing-windmills\/","title":{"rendered":"“Tilting at Windmills”"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Erin Morrisey<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"Left to Right:\u00a0 Dr. Jerry Farrell and Dr. Stephen Bloom<\/p>\n

Dr. Stephen Bloom:\u00a0 Elementary Mathematics Education<\/h1>\n

Dr. Bloom has been a teacher (of some sort) for 44 years, and he\u2019s a senior member of the COE. Dr. Bloom\u2019s passion and continuously growing heart for the field of education prove that you never grow out of your dreams.<\/p>\n

He began his academic journey at the University of Northern Iowa, which was known for two things at the time: business and teacher training. Dr. Bloom first enrolled in the business school, but decided quickly that he didn\u2019t enjoy it and switched to the only other field available, which happened to be education. This decision wasn\u2019t made without a little thought, though. Dr. Bloom had worked with boy scouts and children his whole life, and he had always enjoyed interacting with young kids. Soon, Dr. Bloom began teaching at an elementary school, where he remained for 12 years and taught grades 2-6. The wide age range of students with whom he interacted never bothered Dr. Bloom; as always, he simply enjoyed working with children.<\/p>\n

After 12 years of teaching children, Dr. Bloom began to wonder how he could impact more kids at a time\u2014because that had always been his main focus. Why would anyone want to become a teacher if they didn\u2019t want to impact kids in a major way? So Dr. Bloom went back to school. He got his PhD from University of Iowa and began training teachers to impact students. He then taught for nine years at the National Louis University in Chicago.<\/p>\n

In 1996 and Dr. Bloom came to Indianapolis to teach elementary mathematics education at Butler (a school previously unknown to him). Since then, Dr. Bloom said he has only met wonderful people and students here.<\/p>\n

When Dr. Bloom first came to Butler, he worked with students in their junior year and beyond\u2014he led them through their student teaching experiences and the struggles that come with teaching math to grade school students. He loves that he can teach college students fractions one day, then watch those same students pass off that knowledge to students in classrooms almost immediately. The field work component clearly thrills Dr. Bloom beyond belief\u2014the amazing ability of crafting experiences that are strongly connected to real students is inspiring.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s this content area of math that Dr. Bloom truly loves sharing with others. Often, he says, math is a \u201cfour-letter word\u201d to kids. It\u2019s big and it\u2019s scary in grade school. By the time students have reached fourth and fifth grade, the ones who have struggled the most have already turned off their brains to math. That\u2019s why Dr. Bloom\u2019s unique passion for the combination of math and elementary education is so important. He affectionally called himself Don Quixote, just \u201ctilting at windmills\u201d in the attempt to save kids from the hatred of math that would prevent them from succeeding later on in life.<\/p>\n

Dr. Bloom says the most important thing teachers can do for their math students\u2014especially in the early grades\u2014is to help the students walk out of the classroom knowing how to \u201cwork around the potholes,\u201d that is, knowing their weaknesses, but knowing that (with the right direction) they can move past them.<\/p>\n

But Dr. Bloom doesn\u2019t stick around just because of his passion for math. He loves that the students at Butler can run after the same dream he has always had: impacting students.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo one at this college thinks [our work] isn\u2019t about the kids\u2026 peel the layers back and bring what we know [content, experience, etc.] and we can all agree that it\u2019s all about the kids.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Erin Morrisey Left to Right:\u00a0 Dr. Jerry Farrell and Dr. Stephen Bloom Dr. Stephen Bloom:\u00a0 Elementary Mathematics Education Dr. Bloom has been a teacher (of some sort) for 44 years, and he\u2019s a senior member of the COE. Dr.… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1546,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[273686],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faculty-profiles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/coe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/coe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/coe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/coe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1546"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/coe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=941"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/coe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":997,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/coe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941\/revisions\/997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/coe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/coe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/coe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}