SHERMAN OAKS : Retired Math Teacher Honored by Council

Take 14 years of teaching mathematics at the Sherman Oaks Center for Enriched Studies. Add 22 years more experience in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Multiply with a devotion to learning and teaching the newest developments in mathematics.

That equals this year’s winner of the George Polya Memorial Award of the California Mathematics Council, an organization made up of 15,000 math instructors that annually recognizes one California educator who has shown excellence in teaching mathematics.

This year’s award was given to Marian Pasternack, who retired last year from the Sherman Oaks Center for Enriched Studies.

“It’s recognition by your peers and that’s the best recognition there is,” said Pasternack, a Chatsworth resident. Although she is not teaching anymore, she is still involved in working with math teachers and attending conferences.

Looking back at her career, Pasternack said she recalls most fondly the advances made in mathematics education in the late 1960s and ‘70s.

Those advances allowed students “to really learn from the materials rather than from someone telling them, but that all sort of died out,” Pasternack said. “But it’s coming in again and students are discovering for themselves again.”

Between 1972 and 1975, Pasternack took part in an experimental educational project at Devonshire Elementary School. “Students had a great deal of choice in what they did during the day,” she explained.

Pasternack said many teachers at the school were not in favor of the project because the students refused to walk in a line and were too noisy.

Among the math-related projects she looks forward to is helping at the schools her two granddaughters will attend.

Pasternack boasted that her younger granddaughter, who is 1 1/2, when asked if she can count to a million, will reply, “Yes.”