Dan Gelfand
Middle School Math Teacher
dan@synergyschool.org
I grew up in what was a small town in Somerset County, New Jersey and I loved it. I spent much of my early childhood catching salamanders and frogs, riding my bike around the paths and streets of my town, walking miles to fishing holes, and creating explosions with makeshift science kits. As I have aged, I expanded that exploration of my environment to the world at large, spending many months of my life hiking, biking, kayaking, and camping throughout the planet. I find that travelling resets my world-view and reinvigorates my desire to help make this a better place for us all.
I liked math as a student, but struggled with memorizing my times tables and suffered through all of the rote practice worksheets we had. I love math as an adult and have come to see it as an innate human language. All of us are capable of learning to read, write, and speak it, but we all learn to do so at different rates. I support the educational ideals of the Common Core State Standards, which help created more developmentally appropriate grade level standards, as well as broadening access to math by emphasizing a variety of modalities and processes for accessing math. Prior to joining Synergy in 2016, I spent several years working on developing pieces of the SFUSD's new mathematics curriculum. Despite my recent personal focus on mathematics, I am passionate about all areas of our curriculum.
Learning is a life-long passion for me and I have a BA in Political Science from Washington University in St. Louis, an MBA from NYU, and have finished all the coursework for an MA in Mathematics at SFSU. Teaching is my third career: publishing/distribution, volunteer recruiting, then teaching. I taught in the SFUSD for for 12 years, with a one year break teaching middle school math at Megan Furth Academy. I was thrilled to have been invited to join the Synergy community as the middle-school mathematics teacher and could not be happier to be here.