Henrico's Top Teachers – Ara Duszak, Short Pump Middle School

Ara Duszak’s path to her Short Pump Middle School algebra classroom was a winding one with a few wrong turns, but she’s certain that it led her to the exact place she was supposed to be.

As a youngster with a love of math and science, Duszak heard “You should be an engineer” often. She enrolled at Virginia Tech planning to major in chemical engineering, but after less than a year, she realized the focus wasn’t right for her. A switch to chemistry seemed natural until she began taking chemistry courses that included no math.

“I realized that the only think I liked about chemistry was the math,” she said. So she became a math major and, thanks to input from the school’s counseling center, added an education focus. A few years later, she was teaching math at Henrico’s J.R. Tucker High School. But her motivation quickly soured when the state implemented its Standards of Learning tests.

“Instead of all the fantastic ‘Get kids excited about learning!’ it suddenly became, ‘Just kidding – teach to the test,’” Duszak recalled.

Not content to do that – and recalling the advice from her high school calculus teacher, who warned her that “the moment you decide this is not for you, get out” – she left teaching.

In the decade that followed, she earned an MBA from the University of Richmond, spent time as a stay-at-home mom raising her kids, and went to work for Capital One as a business analyst.

“It was interesting work but it just didn’t sit well with my soul,” she recalled of the latter. “I really missed working with kids.”

So she started tutoring, and then when her youngest child began kindergarten, she returned in a part-time math interventionist at Kaechele Elementary before landing in her full-time position at Short Pump Middle, where she’s now in her third year.

“This is absolutely the best,” she said. Her students “have the enthusiasm of elementary kids without some of the cynicism of the high school kids. I’m a little bit crazy, and they respond well to that, while I think high school kids would just think I’m crazy.”

She particularly enjoys the chance to reach students before they have decided they don’t like math.

“How many adults are like, ‘Ugh, I hate math,’ because they didn’t get the foundation of it?” she asked. “If they already have learned to hate math, then it’s too late.”

Students in Duszak’s classroom would be hard-pressed to hate much about the way she teaches the subject. She works to show them how math can help them solve problems and think.

Through a partnership with a technology teacher at the school, Duszak showed her students the role angles play in construction; the technology class built a wall for her students to measure. Another lesson explored the role math plays in designing rollercoasters.

“If you’re not having fun, then why are you doing it,” Duszak said of her outlook on teaching.

Perhaps it’s not coincidental that she teachers algebra courses; her own love of math blossomed in her algebra II class in high school, thanks to a teacher who displayed “the same kind of kooky enthusiasm that I think I have,” she said. “You could tell he really cared about it. That taught me it’s ok to find a way to connect with each kid.”

One parent nominator explained that Duszak was looking out for her child’s complete education, not just his math skills.

“My son’s math grade started going down so we conferenced about what he needed to do differently,” she wrote. “His math grade improved over time. However, his grades in other classes started to slip. Knowing my concern for his performance, Ms. Duszak alerted me to the problem. Not only was she looking out for my son in her class, but in all of his classes. That shows that she cares about the students and looks out for them beyond her realm of responsibility.”

Her role at Short Pump, to which the students she worked with at Kaechele feed, has allowed Duszak the unique perspective to see those elementary school students who struggled at times with math turn into confident math students at the middle school level. And she isn’t afraid of letting them make mistakes, either.

“That’s why we do math in pencil,” she said.

Duszak seems to be penciling herself into a classroom role for the foreseeable future.

“At Cap One, I never felt like this is what I was meant to do,” she said. But at Short Pump, “I’m doing what I’m meant to do.”