The Presidential Award is a recognition of mastery as a mathematics instructor. It is a reflection of the impact my teaching has on my students. It’s one thing to love teaching mathematics, but it is quite another to inspire students to love and understand mathematics on their own. It’s exciting to showcase what I have learned and how I operate in the classroom with a broad audience. The award is a celebration of all the educators in my life who have made me the kind of teacher I am today.

Spencer Olmsted Olympia, WA | K-6, Mathematics, 2022

The official biography below was current at the time of the award.

Spencer Olmsted has been an educator for the past 18 years. He began his teaching career in a fifth grade classroom at L.P. Brown Elementary School, where he taught for three years. He spent the next seven years specializing in mathematics and science in a fifth grade team at Pioneer Elementary School. He then moved to Roosevelt Elementary School where he taught both fourth and fifth grade self-contained classrooms. For the past four years, he has served as the fourth/fifth grade highly-capable, self-contained classroom teacher for the district, where he teaches all subjects. Spencer has a passion for teaching through rich problems. He recognized an opportunity to teach a unit on the Rubik’s Cube this past academic year. It leveraged student interests and prior knowledge and incorporated several mathematics skills. It required persistence, collaboration, procedural thinking, spatial reasoning, and pattern recognition. It guided students through their fear of failure and struggle, and in the end, provided the kind of joy that is only achievable after accomplishing something challenging. In addition, Spencer delivers mathematics workshops in school districts nationwide during the summer academic break. Before teaching, Spencer was a software developer based in San Francisco, CA. He earned a B.A. from Pitzer College in 1995, and a B.S. in elementary education from Montana State University in 2005. He completed an M.Ed. in mathematics education at The Evergreen State College in 2012 and earned National Board Certification in early adolescent mathematics in 2013. He is certified to teach kindergarten through eighth grade and mathematics K-12.

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