As a youngster, Karen West used to cry when she had to go to math class.

“I remember that vividly,” she says. “I was just so frustrated. I just couldn’t get it.”

Time and a series of state and national workshops have changed all that, and West is now one of Maine’s leading cheerleaders for math education. Last month, she and three other Maine teachers were honored in Washington, D.C., with the Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching.

Those honored were Lisa Marie Damian-Marvin, a teacher at Georges Valley High School in Thomaston, for secondary science; Will Tad Johnson, a teacher at Orono High School, for secondary mathematics; Ingrid Jean Stressenger, a teacher at Pond Cove Elementary School in Cape Elizabeth, for elementary science. West, who teaches fourth grade at the Hancock Grammar School, was honored for her work in elementary mathematics.

A teacher for 25 years now, West teaches math, science, social studies and language arts. She admits that her math phobia stayed with her into adulthood and into her teaching.

“For several years, I didn’t like teaching math,” she confessed.

That all changed about eight years ago when she became accidentally involved in a teacher workshop that included a “lot of motion, a lot of thinking and a lot of hands-on type work.”

Jackie Mitchell of the state Department of Education, was at that workshop and asked West to join a state leadership team for math education. Maine was involved in a national pilot program at the time, and that opened a whole new world of math education for West.

“The next thing I knew I was being whisked away to California and New Mexico for workshops,” she said. “It was so exciting. And it was perfect for me. I was at a point where I was a little burned out. That happens. But there were so many new things happening and I was able to bring back new things to the classroom. It made a difference for me personally and professionally.”

“Different” is how she describes her classroom and she bristles when she hears people say that schools don’t teach the basics anymore.

“We are teaching basic math skills, we’re just using different teaching styles,” she said. “Research shows that not everybody learns in the same way. If you’re going to try to reach all students, you’ve got to provide for all the different learning styles.”

West tries to tie everything she does to real life, and almost always her lessons involve an activity or performance task of some kind that will keep the kids active. Sometimes, she says, she works backward, starting the activity without telling the students what they’re trying to learn. In one such activity, she gives them a pile of blocks and tells them the blocks have to be packaged so that each student gets the same number of each kind of block.

“They work at it for a while and then they realize ‘hey, this is dividing,”‘ West said.

The activities give her students the opportunity to act out the kinds of word problems that are a staple of math classes everywhere: “If there are 50 people in the room and you shake hands with half of them, how many times will you have shaken hands?”

Instead of working out the answer on paper, “we get up and do it.”

Her room is chock-full of all kinds of neat toys and puzzles, like the beach ball covered in math problems – you toss the beach ball and whoever catches it has to solve the problem underneath their left thumb – the set of tangrams, plastic, brightly colored geometric shapes that, if you put them together correctly, form a square, and the big spongy dice.

West’s enthusiasm is contagious and she admits she sometimes gets overly excited in class.

“I sometimes close the door to the room because it looks like we’re playing a lot of the time,” she said. “I call it organized chaos. But I try to give them some freedom. They’re often on the floor when they’re doing math, as long as they’re working and not bothering anybody. They don’t have to be at their desks all the time.”

That freedom extends to encouraging them to take a chance and, on occasion, to be wrong.

“It’s OK to be wrong. We learn from being wrong,” she said, adding that she sometimes will put something wrong on the board to see if the kids will catch it. They were shy at first, but now they always let her know.

“Some of them will even volunteer to put their wrong answers on the board. They’ve learned how to interact, and they know how to correctly comment on that child’s error and to talk about how to make it right.”

Finding different ways to match different learning styles that include the content areas required by the state’s Learning Results can be challenging and exhausting, West said. And the process also involves finding different ways to evaluate a student. She still relies on the old multiple-choice tests, but West also tries to develop other assessments that give everyone a fair chance to show what they’ve learned. More and more, she said, she uses open-ended questions similar to those used in the Maine Educational Assessment tests.

“Multiple choice is fine, but the open-ended questions allow the students to be creative problem solvers and to use everything they’ve learned. As with the performance tasks, they can be doing multiplication, geometry and data analysis all in one task,” she said.

And just as there are different ways to ask the questions, there are different ways for the kids to provide the answers.

“We call it math communication. There are different ways to communicate besides writing. Draw it. Act it out. Get something from the shelf.”

West has become something of a celebrity in town since the announcement of her award, and she hopes that notoriety will encourage other teachers in all fields to apply for this type of honor.

“There are a lot of people doing good things in education today,” she said. “But they need to let people know what they’re doing. Teachers don’t get many pats on the back, even when they do something good.”

Rita Colwell, the director of the National Science Foundation which administers the awards, agreed.

“Our nation needs excellent educators at the elementary and secondary levels,” Colwell said during the ceremonies in Washington last month. “The talent and motivation it takes to cultivate young minds deserves recognition. Today, we honor those mathematics and science teachers who bring innovation into the classroom and spark the desire to learn in our children – our future leaders. The dedication to excellence of these teachers should inspire us all.”

The award includes a $7,500 grant for each teacher to use in his or her school. West said she is still contemplating how to spend those grant funds. While she plans to add another computer to her classroom, she also remembers her initial fear of math and may try to do something to help kids in a similar situation.

“There are a lot of kids out there with a math phobia. I’m thinking of trying to develop a program that focuses on them, something that would take them out of the classroom, sort of a math camp.”