The educator, which was awarded the Milken Award, shares the teaching style, tips during the laboratory sessions in Coeur d'Aleene

Coeur d'Aleene – he went around his colorful and surrounding classroom and adhered to various desks to examine himself from small student groups, while his students worked on cylinder volume answers with formulas such as V = πr^2h.

The soft music played as a timer ticked until the time of discussion. The math teacher of Lakes Middle School, Marcus Ross, encouraged the students to dialogue about their work and conclusions.

“How did you get there?” He asked a group that offered an answer.

“Tell me why you think that,” he replied to them and patiently waited for the students to explain their mathematical process.

He asked the class for examples of cylinders in everyday life and asked for people who gave answers such as toilet paper rolls, car ripening and water towers.

One of the students at this time, Eli Nail, said Ross' class is a good environment in which you can learn.

“He talks to us,” said Eli. “He shows us that he takes care of what his job is.”

Ross was not the only teacher in the room on March 5. A handful of educators from all over North Idaho watched Ross' teaching style during a mathematical laboratory session, an annual exercise in which Ross has participated in four years.

“Thank you for coming into my classroom and looking into my world,” Ross wrote in a letter to the educators present. “I love learning, growing and experiencing insights from peers with the same passion for this profession.”

Ross is a former student of the lakes and graduates of the Lake City High School in Lake City. His award was announced in November.

The milks of Educator Awards were created by Philanthrop Lowell in 1987 to reward faulty awards in the world of education with $ 25,000 and to give excellent specialists for early to medium-sized specialists who are already doing great things in their classrooms.

Ross, who is in his sixth year of the lesson, was praised for his four-stage classroom management system, which is now used all over lakes and uses the different colors of LED lights to keep the students in the task and to inform them when it is time to change independent work, partnership/peer support and small group activities.

“It only helps with my transitions so quickly that it saves me time and energy,” said Ross. “I think that I am less tired and the students tend to go straight to what I have to do. This animal system makes my life easier.”

Nick Lilyquist, headmaster of Canfield Middle School, was a math teacher before becoming administrator 17 years ago. He said Ross had taught the lesson of the cylinder and volume formula much better than him.

“I would have said: 'Hey, you know what that is? This is a cylinder', and then we would have gone through the procedural fluid and I would have shown the formula and we would have 17 (examples) of them and I thought that they were really good because they could take a calculator and they could do volume formulas,” he said.

“It is only the development of the lesson and so on,” he said to Ross, “so much praise to her.”

Kathy Prummer, a regional math specialist from the Regional Math Center at the University of Idaho, was one of the visiting educators who watched Ross in action.

“It is astonishing stuff that happens in this building,” she said.

Marcus Ross, center in Plaid, discusses his teaching style and what works in his classroom on March 5 during a MathematikaBor on the Lakes Middle School. On this day, educators from the region visited Ross' classroom to observe how he performs lessons and includes students.

The Miller educator Marcus Ross introduces cylinder and how to find her volume on March 5 during a morning math lessons in the Lakes Middle School.

The mathematical teacher and the whey pedagogue Marcus Ross speaks with eighth graders Asher Barajas with cylinder volume during a morning class.