2006 Grants & Awards Recipients

Congradulations to all of this year's recipients! If you want to see who are past recipients have been, please see our archive.

MATHWEST Teacher of the Year Award

Dr. Alan Lipp

MATHWEST's Teacher of Year in action in the classroon. Thank you for being such a great teacher!!!

     Alan Lipp has been teaching at The Williston Northampton School for 31 years. As Department Head for many years here, Alan has been instrumental in keeping the department abreast of and actively involved in the latest pedagogical and technological advances in teaching. He has unfailingly served as a valuable resource for the entire department and is always supportive of the efforts of his colleagues.
In the classroom Alan is a dynamic and charismatic presence. At his best with the most advanced students, Alan has been at the forefront of teaching our AP and advanced courses. He regularly supervises the most advanced students in individual Directed Studies, opportunities for students who have achieved beyond the scope of our core curriculum. Alan enthusiastically leads his students to explore complex concepts and pose questions to move themselves forward. In any given class Alan can be found wildly gesticulating and bouncing around the room in his exuberance to communicate the material. His excitement and passion for the subject and for teaching it is readily apparent, as is his dedication to fostering the thought process in his students as they work through challenging questions. Alan is single-minded in the classroom, completely and energetically focused on what he is endeavoring to communicate. A true scholar and academician, Alan works ceaselessly to awaken the intellectual curiosity of all of his students and to further it in his colleagues. He has inspired generations of both students and teachers.

     For many years Alan has been the Coordinator of Computing for the Summer Math Program at Mt. Holyoke College. In this capacity he writes the curriculum, directly supervises other teachers, and runs workshops for the rest of the staff. Alan has also taught at the college level, most recently as an adjunct faculty member at UMass last year. He is the author of a recently published book about slope-fields and is presently completing one on Precalculus Review. He is a member of several professional organizations and regularly attends conferences in his field. Last summer he was a presenter for two workshops at the AP National Convention, and last fall he was a presenter at the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics conference. He has also presented for The College Board.

     In his decades of teaching here, Alan has shown himself to be not only a brilliant teacher but a very caring one as well. Alan is committed to addressing issues of math anxiety in the classroom and educational approaches that work to reduce it. He works to promote gender equality in math education, and he is proactive in addressing diversity issues as well. Empathetic and thoughtful, Alan is generous with his time when dealing with students or colleagues in distress. A compassionate listener, Alan has shepherded generations of students through their own struggles of finding their path and developing their potential.

     Always a source of knowledge, wisdom and guidance in his dealing with others, MATHWEST is pleased to present this award to Dr. Alan Lipp.