2014 Rotary Teacher of the Year/Excellence in Teaching Grand Award
2014 – Appeared on The Rachael Ray Show with students
2012 – Opened Mr. Summers’s Math Academy
2011 News 2 Educator of the Week
2006 Putnam County Middle School Teacher of the Year
2006 Rotary Teacher of the Year/Excellence in Teaching Grand Award
2002 Avery Trace Teacher of the Year
Has a B.S. degree in Secondary Education-Math
Has a M.A. degree in Instructional Leadership
Graduated Magna Cum Laude from Tennessee Tech University
Graduated as Valedictorian from Upperman High School
Mr. Summers's Teaching Philosophy
Jason Summers
Some Career Highlights
I believe the key to understanding math lies in repetition, retention, and reward (what I call the “3 R’s of Math”). I use humor and repetition in order to make mathematical concepts and problem solving become easy and automatic. From the moment my class begins until the moment my students leave, we work math problems together. Never does a student just give an answer in my class. He or she must explain each and every step as well as explain the meaning of the answer. We do this over and over until the responses become almost hypnotic as if they are flowing to their own rhythm. After this constant repetition, even the weakest of math students start to see how easy it can be to solve math problems. My students also learn how to take notes properly and how to become more organized.
In order to help students retain important facts and procedures, I incorporate music, celebrities, humor, sports, trivia, and pop culture. For example, when solving inequalities in algebra, one must reverse the sign when dividing by a negative. This is one of the most missed problems in all of math. When my students see this type of problem, they immediately call it a Missy Elliott problem. We named it after the female rapper with the song “Work It.” Her lyrics repeat the phrase “flip it and reverse it.” We use this song as a way to remember that we must flip and reverse the inequality sign. Using techniques like this keep students actively engaged and make even the most boring lesson appear interesting. We have also written to many of the celebrities we use in class and have received many autographs from those celebrities. Those autographs are on display in my classroom. My students and I even appeared on television on The Rachael Ray Show in 2014 to discuss how this works.
The final “R” is reward. I firmly believe that rewarding students is a key to keeping students motivated throughout the entire learning process. My ticket incentive program I invented rewards students for always trying their best and for showing improvement.
From day one in my class, my students are told they are sitting in one of the best math classrooms in the entire state. Students hear everyday in my class just how easy math can be, they hear how I expect the very best from each of them, they hear how successful they are going to be, they see their hard work rewarded each day, they see that repetition brings improvement every day, they see how math can be fun and enjoyable, and by the end of the year they not only believe they are the very best but they are ready to show that they are the best.
No matter how education changes and no matter what standards we teach, good teaching still comes down to motivating students, making lessons interesting and understandable to all students, and challenging all students from the lowest-achieving students all the way to the most gifted of students. My hope is that all of my students will continue to try their best and never stop at trying to improve.
Jason Summers is an award-winning Putnam County teacher with 24 years of experience teaching Algebra 1, Algebra 2, geometry, and 8th grade math. Using the “The Summers Approach” and his “3 R’s of Math,” Mr. Summers has proven results at both the local and state level. His students at Avery Trace are among the very best in the entire state in both achievement and growth. In fact, in 2012, Mr. Summers’s students ranked 4th in the entire state of Tennessee on the growth index scale of the Algebra I EOC exam.
Mr. Summers's Math Academy