Simply put, Don Barry loves a good math problem. Ever since he started teaching in 1973 he's been involved in math contests either as a problem writer or organizer. Currently, he's the head author of the American Regions Mathematics League (ARML), a position he's held since 1995. See www.arml.com for sample questions. He's been the main author of the Massachusetts Association of Mathematics Leagues (MAML) and the New England Association of Mathematics Leagues (NEAML) end of the year contests since 1984. He's written four books, all collections of problems; he's given a number of talks at conferences, often sharing his love of trapezoids; and he organizes the mathematical prize exams given at Phillips Academy each year. He values developing opportunities for students to experience their own creative powers in mathematics, a difficult but satisfying task. Barry and math instructor Patrick Farrell help run an enthusiastic and lively math club that meets once a week and takes part in a number of math contests with delightful success.

Barry graduated from Carleton College in 1970 with a major in philosophy and then received a Rockefeller fellowship that sent him to Yale Divinity School where he earned an M.Div. degree in 1973. Rather than become a minister, he opted to teach mathematics in Turkey to Turkish students and found his true calling. After seven years, he and his family returned to the United States in 1980 to teach at Andover. He's run a dorm, coached boys' and girls' cross country, boys' JV2 basketball, golf and speedball, an Andover combination of soccer and rugby. Drawing on his international experience, he helped found the Model UN club in 1980 and served as its advisor for 20 years. He and his wife, Roxy Barry, director of summer opportunities, have three children who are PA alums, Ivan '94, Heather '97 and Kezi '02.

By teaching geometry, precalculus and calculus, Sue Buckwalter loves introducing her students to what got her hooked on math: “the thrill of solving a challenging puzzle, the amazing way in which mathematics can model the real world and the beauty of logical systems.” When she herself took trigonometry in 11th grade, she discovered she loved writing proofs and helping her friends with their math questions. “Math teaching was a way to combine both in a single career,” she says.

Buckwalter received a B.A. degree from the University of Northern Iowa, where she majored in mathematics teaching, and an M.S. degree in mathematics from Northwestern University. At Andover since 2001, she serves as house counselor in Smith House, as well as head coach of girls’ JV volleyball and girls’ JV2 basketball. Her hobbies include quilting and solving crossword puzzles.

After beginning his career at Berea H.S. in Ohio, Andy Cline came to Andover to teach and coach in 1979.  He enjoys teaching throughout the curriculum from algebra to calculus and particularly likes teaching geometry.  “It has a strong visual component which invites the use of props and hands-on exercises,” says Cline.  “Also, geometry problems are often like puzzles to be solved.”  Throughout his time at PA, Cline has been continuously energized and excited by the combination of his students’ eagerness to learn and his colleagues’ enthusiasm for their work in the classroom.  In 2005 he was appointed to the Frederick W. Beinecke Teaching Foundation.  
 
Cline majored in math at the College of Wooster and later earned his masters degree from Wesleyan University. As a teacher in Andover’s residential community, he has embraced the “triple threat” model of teaching, coaching and house counseling and treasures the opportunity to work with youngsters in such diverse aspects of their high school years.  Head baseball coach since 1986, Cline has guided the Blue to five league championships, has also coached football and soccer and is now the school’s Sports Information Director.  Living on campus with his wife Jennie during the time their two children, Heidi ’94, and Kevin ’97, were growing up, he served as a dormitory house counselor for 18 years and as cluster dean of West Quad North for five years.  He is now a day student advisor while also helping to coordinate the PA-Red Cross blood drives and the House Counselor Night Out program.   He enjoys remaining active with tennis, golf, hiking and biking and has recently taken up woodworking.

Pat Farrell majored in philosophy at Amherst College and upon graduating began teaching mathematics at private residential schools.  He first experienced the beauty of mathematics while at the blackboard deriving the quadratic formula for an Algebra II class.  Shortly thereafter, he completed an M.S. degree in mathematics at the University of Connecticut.

After seven years of private school teaching, he moved his family to Indiana to teach at a public residential school that focused on mathematics and science.  Four years later, he had the dream  experience of every educator when he was hired as the math department chair at a brand new school - the Maine School of Science and Mathematics (MSSM).  He developed a curriculum that focused on AP courses in Calculus and Statistics and started a math competitions program that grew beyond his wildest dreams.  At the height of the MSSM's success, the school's BC Calculus students all earned perfect 5's on the AP exam and the Math Team won State and New England championships.  But the Math Team also measured its success in terms of participation.  Math Team at the MSSM was the school's most popular activity involving 1/3 of the student body.   During this time, Pat was given two teaching awards - the Siemens Award for excellence in the teaching of AP mathematics and the Edith May Slyffe Award for preparing students for the American Mathematics Competitions grade 12 and under exam.

Pat came to Andover in the fall of 2004 with his wife Karen, children Dan and Kate, and dogs Fred and Abbey.  Kate is a member of Phillips Andover's class of 2008 and Dan is in the class of 2006 at Andover High School.  Karen and Pat are co-house counselors in Johnson North.  Pat coaches the long jump and triple jump but also enjoys cross-country skiing, hiking, and sports that involve flying discs - ultimate frisbee and disc golf.  During the summers, Karen and he teach at Andover's Math and Science for Minority Students program.

After receiving a B.A. degree in mathematics from Mount Holyoke College, Ellen Glover worked for MIT Lincoln Laboratory as a software designer for research groups in radar signal processing and machine intelligence technology. “After six years in front of a computer terminal, I knew I wanted more contact with people,” she says. She earned a master’s of education degree at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and came to PA in 1991, where she currently teaches courses across the math curriculum, including AP Statistics. “I can bring in the newspaper every day and convince students of the relevance of their studies, as well as help them develop their ability to decipher information and produce accurate data,” she says. She also loves teaching 9th-graders. “I share my enthusiasm for mathematics with them, and they share their enthusiasm for everything with me.”

A lifelong soccer player, Glover coaches girls’ JV1 soccer. Her own soccer career included playing in competitive youth soccer leagues on Long Island; in the Empire State Games and Bay State Games; internationally in Denmark, Norway, Canada and England; as an All New England player in college; on Eastern Massachusetts Women’s Soccer League teams; and every Wednesday night with other faculty members in the Cage. She has three children, all with the same birthday—the twin boys were born on their sister’s third birthday. A house counselor in Stimson House, Glover loves to hike, bike, camp, play sports, cook, read and travel.

Kathryn Green enjoys working with and getting to know young adults “as students, athletes and community members during the most formative and transitional period in their lives,” she says. Although her academic strengths were in the humanities as a student at Hawken School in Ohio, she became interested in mathematics as an undergraduate at Boston University—due primarily to her dynamic professors. “Their passion for the subject and the challenges they presented really made mathematics come alive for me,” she says. As a four-year member of BU’s crew team, rowing was like “a second major.” Her desire to teach at a high school with a strong rowing program led her to join the faculty at Kent School in Connecticut in 1989. In 1994, she came to Andover, where she is the head girls’ crew coach.

Green earned a B.A. degree in mathematics from BU and an M.S.T. degree in mathematics from the University of New Hampshire. She enjoys teaching courses at all levels of Andover’s math curriculum. In summer 2000, with mathematics instructor Bill Scott, she ran teaching and technology workshops for Pakistani secondary school teachers in Karachi and Gilgit as part of an International Academic Partnership initiative. For the past 15 years, she has run a girls' dorm, but in fall 2004, she will move to Churchill House with her husband, Chad Green, director of community service andd cluster dean of West Quad North. The Greens have two daughters and a much-loved Chinook named Gus.

After graduating from Bowdoin College in 1998, Scott Hoenig began his teaching career at Andover as a teaching fellow.  Aside from a two-year stint spent earning his masters’ degree in mathematics from Boston University, he has been teaching and coaching at Andover ever since. He particularly enjoys teaching pre-calculus and calculus courses, and he has recently been developing a non-calculus-based probability elective.

In addition to teaching math, Mr. Hoenig is the head coach of the Ultimate program, an assistant coach of the boys’ water polo team, and an academic advisor to 12 ninth grade boys. He and his wife, Jennifer, live in Rockwell House, the largest ninth grade boys’ dorm on campus.

Jacques Hugon joined the PA faculty in 2001, after working for 17 years in the high-tech industry as an engineer and manager. He made this mid-career transition because of his lifelong fondness for learning and education and a desire to return to an individual contributor position. He enjoys the daily challenge of teaching math and computer science at PA and the eagerness and motivation of the students. Having taught pre-calculus math classes and introductory as well as AP-level courses in computer science, Hugon's latest effort involves designing a new course (Comp 310) focused on business productivity tools (Excel, PowerPoint and Web design) and their real-world applications, providing high school students with practical, up-to-date computer and analytical skills.

Hugon received B.A. and M.S. degrees in computer science from Harvard College and an M.B.A. degree from Harvard Business School. He is the head coach of the Andover boys' varsity swim team. His personal interests include family, reading, Formula 1 racing, football, the wine industry and high-tech entrepreneurship.

Corbin Lang loves teaching geometry. “Every time I teach it I discover new connections and investigate new theorems,” he says. “It is never the same class twice; there is always an organic development of ideas that refreshes the material.” He likes to explore ways to use props and manipulatives, including dynamic geometry software, to bring concepts and ideas alive for his students.

Lang received a B.S. degree in mathematics from the University of Oregon and an M.S. degree in mathematics from Montana State University. On the Andover faculty since 1995, he also serves as associate dean of studies, scheduling officer, and head track and field coach. He is married to mathematics instructor Nancy Lang, and they have two young sons. He enjoys fly-fishing, biking, disk golf and pole vaulting.

After going through the ROTC program at Cornell University, where she received a B.A. degree in mathematics and worked part-time in the defense industry, Nancy Lang served on active duty in the U.S. Air Force. Through these experiences, she explored firsthand some of the applications of mathematics in modeling and engineering. After receiving an M.S. degree in mathematics from the University of Massachusetts/Lowell, she joined the Andover faculty in 1993.

Lang enjoys teaching all levels of math. “There's something fantastic about teaching an Algebra I class and an Honors AP Calculus class back-to-back,” she says. “It keeps me thinking about how I'm teaching and why the math matters. It's easy to share enthusiasm for the power of mathematics with all levels of students.” A house counselor in Johnson Hall, Lang also is head coach of the girls' cross country team. She and her husband Corbin, also a teacher in the math department, have three young children.

A recipient of the 2003 Radio Shack National Teacher Award and the 1999 Siemens Award for Advanced Placement for Mathematics, Science and Technology for New England, Maria Litvin has taught computer science and mathematics at Phillips Academy since 1987. She has known she wanted to teach math since middle school, when she found she enjoyed the elegance of mathematics, as well as helping her classmates understand and solve homework problems. She brought that same enthusiasm to teaching at PA and coaching the Computer Science Team, which, for a number of years, has placed first or second in the U.S. Northern Region in the American Computer Science League (ACSL), in the top 10 in ACSL’s national all-star competitions and in the top four nationally on the Continental Math League Comp Sci contests.

Litvin, who holds an M.S. degree in math and education, also is an Advanced Placement Computer Science exam reader and, as a consultant for The College Board, provides AP training for high school computer science teachers. Prior to joining the Andover faculty, she taught computer science at Boston University. She and her husband, Gary Litvin, co-wrote and published several leading high school computer science textbooks, including Java Methods A & AB: Object-Oriented Programming and Data Structures, AP Edition, now used for AP computer science courses in hundreds of schools. She is also the author of Be Prepared for the AP Computer Science Exam in Java. Outside the classroom, she serves as a complementary house counselor in Morton House and is an academic adviser. A former Search and Rescue coach, she enjoys hiking, kayaking and traveling with her two grown children.

Paul Murphy has loved teaching at Andover since 1989 because of the people—both the faculty and students. Currently teaching mostly seniors in calculus, he says the course “allows students to see why they spent so many years studying all the other math. Calculus is a culminating experience course.” He first liked math as a student at Andover, then continued his studies at Bates, where he was class president and a Dana Scholar majoring in math. He began his Andover career as a teaching fellow and later earned a master's degree from the University of New Hampshire.

Murphy, who stays in shape by running, coaches PA's New England champion girls' varsity swim team. He has served as a cluster dean and on many committees. He is currently the director of the Andover Summer Session. He and his wife, Debby Murphy '86, senior associate dean of admission, have three children.

Deborah Olander
Instructor in Mathematics

Academic Support Specialist

When Deb Olander and her twin brother set off to college as math majors, many people expected her to become a math teacher, the typical route for female math majors in the late '70s.  Deb, however, was not considering teaching at that point in her life. She loved math, and was looking to explore careers with math applications.  She went on to earn a master’s degree in Operations Research at Stanford University, and worked at Bell Laboratories and Digital Equipment Corporation for the next ten years. 

When her first child was born, she was ready to explore career options and set off to earn an MS Ed. degree from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.  Deb went on to teach in public high school and at Merrimack College, and during a child-rearing hiatus, she operated a business selling children’s educational software to parents and tutored high school students, including students at the International School of Amsterdam, where she lived for two years.

Her tutoring work ultimately led her to Phillips Academy as a faculty member in the Academic Support Center in 2001. During 2002, she began to teach Precalculus and Calculus in the math department, and she now enjoys the balance between the math classroom and the students she serves in the ASC.

Deb enjoys traveling with her husband, Joe Ferguson, and her children, Ryan ’07, and Taryn '10.  She also enjoys discussing fiction with her book group, cooking, and participating in a variety of athletic activities, including walking many miles each year to raise money for breast cancer prevention and research.

In addition to teaching the Andover math curriculum from Elementary Algebra through Honors BC Calculus, Bill Scott is the boys' varsity soccer coach and has coached two New England Prep School Class A championship teams (1994, 1995). He also spent a sabbatical year (1997-98) as assistant men's soccer coach at Stanford University for a team that reached #2 in national rankings. In summer 2001, he and several Andover soccer players were guests of Real Sociedad, a professional soccer team in the north of Spain, where they trained with the club's youth teams. He holds a B.A. degree from The Colorado College and an M.A.L.S. degree from Wesleyan University.

On the Andover faculty since 1987, Scott has been dean of Rabbit Pond cluster, co-chair of the math curriculum committee that completed a study and revision of the PA pre-calculus math curriculum, a member of a committee that designed professional development initiatives for faculty and a member of the Faculty Advisory Committee to the Head of School. Since 1998, he has traveled to Kenya and Pakistan as part of the International Academic Partnership (IAP). Along with several Andover math colleagues, Scott developed a teacher training program at the Institute for Educational Development of Aga Khan University in Karachi, on the Arabian Sea, and at the Professional Development Centre in Gilgit, high up in the Himalayas. In 2003, his work with the IAP took him to Kenya, where he served as a consultant helping with curriculum development. For many years, he has worked for The College Board as both a math consultant and instructor in the Advanced Placement teacher training program. He and his wife, Nina, instructor in English, have three school-age children.