Ballard High School math teacher, Ted Nutting, is the recipient of the first-ever “Excellence in Math Education” award sponsored by “Where’s the Math?”
M.J. McDermott emailed us,
Ted Nutting has been a math teacher at Ballard for 12 years, after retiring from his career as a Coast Guard Officer. For at least the last two years, his AP Calculus AB students have scored the highest by far in the Seattle School District on the AP test. Recognizing this major improvement at Ballard, the state Superintendent of Public Instruction selected him to make a presentation entitled The Ballard Miracle: How AP Calculus Scores Quickly Rose from the Depths to the Stratosphere at the Superintendent’s 2007 January Conference. Ted has been an active voice for excellence in mathematics instruction, writing several editorials which have appeared in The Seattle Times, The Puget Sound Business Journal, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, as well as participating in a math curriculum adoption committee, and testifying at a Washington Learns public hearing and before the Seattle School Board many times.
School Board President Michael DeBell (on the left) presented the award to Mr. Nutting at last night’s Ballard High School PTSA meeting. (Thank you James for the photo!)
![](https://www.myballard.com/wp-content/uploads/2024-My-Ballard-Tile-Ad-Troop-100.png")
Which guy in the photo is the math teacher? I can't figure it out…
The teacher is the one on the right.
Yep, he looks like a math teacher. Congrats, Mr. Nutting! It's it's a difficult job, teaching kids that math makes sense.
Mr. Nutting is such a nice teacher, he put up with a lot of s*it from us that's for sure. One time we were all in trouble and he gave us a pop quiz as punishment. About 10 minutes in he farted so loud and we all just about died laughing, poor guy. He wears the same shirt every Thursday, it looks like graph paper. He is hilarious.
Absolutely fantastic!
Mr. Nutting was actually my AP Calculus teacher when I was in high school! It was a tough class, but I learned a lot.
THIS IS THE CLASSIC EXAMPLE OF WHY NEED MERIT PAY!
This man deserves more then a plaque!
I was at that meeting and the presenter explained how they TRACK student progress and spoke of how high HIS students AP calculus test scores were!
He deserves to be paid MORE then the other teacher in the same schoolwith the same amount of tenure that does nothing more then collect a pay check!
(By the end of the school year she rarely even knows the names of her students!)
Keep it up Mr. Nutting. Ballard should be happy to have you.
Keep it up Mr. Nutting… although I never had you when I was there in 98, I know that you were a great teacher!
Yep!
It annoys the hell out of me that a great teacher like this gets paid less than another teacher simply because that teacher has been around longer.
Kudos to Where's the Math for creating this award and bringing the needed attention to the success stories in math when there are so many problems with math in Seattle Public Schools.
And here here to merit pay for teachers. Shame on SPS for RIFing great teachers while keeping teachers on probation.
Pun Alert…Pun Alert…Pun Alert
In Ballard
Many Teachers: Good
But
Nutting: Special
Ouch.
good job
It would be nice if teachers could reeivie bonuses but merit pay is a completely different idea.
See http://seattle-ed.blogspot.com/ and scroll down to Merit Pay in the right hand column.
I bet if the math teacher either A) decided to break some car mirrors or B) agreed to house some homeless from Portland we'd have ourselves 314 comments. Unfortunately it's a math problem :(