Projects like these are common at Miller, where the Cupertino Union School District's highly acclaimed math curriculum has sent students on to win national championships. The success of this curriculum has inspired the Cupertino Educational Endowment Foundation to award its 20th Anniversary Award to the force behind it, district math resource teacher Mary Fay-Zenk.

"We thought back over the years, because we wanted to pick someone for this award who symbolizes the spirit of what CEEF does," says Eleanor Watanabe, the foundation's executive director. "Mary educates and leads her peers, and she inspires her students. We just knew."

As the district's math resource teacher, Fay-Zenk oversees the math curriculum and makes sure educators are trained to teach it. "Teaching math has changed a lot over the years," she says. "There's been a big shift in what teachers have to teach." She says she's honored to receive the award, a one-time prize given to commemorate the foundation's anniversary, but deflects much of the praise onto the people she's worked with over the years. "I don't do anything alone," she says. "This is such a wonderful district, and there's a cadre of people who've led the changes."

"We were building on what was already a good program," she says, "and the parents in this district are well-educated." This lucky coincidence is something she has tried to harness to further enrich her students' experiences.

She's worked on programs such as "Math for the Curious," a series of workshops bringing children and parents together to learn from math professionals. "They study areas that are different, doing things like folding origami or logic puzzles," she says. "It's a fun atmosphere where it's important to think out of the box."

She also developed a series of courses for teachers called "Thinking Mathematics," designed to augment an educator's training. "A lot of elementary school teachers didn't take math in college because they're not teaching dedicated subjects," she says. Programs like Fay-Zenk's have produced results that attract attention nationally. "People email us from all over the country, asking how we do it," Fay-Zenk says.

Fay-Zenk first set foot in a classroom in 1966 after graduating from Immaculate Heart College, starting out as an English teacher. "There were just so many papers to grade, and problem solving intrigues me," she says. She returned to school at Santa Clara University, graduating with a master's degree in teaching mathematics.

She's also spent all of her 25 years of teaching at the middle school level, which provides a unique experience for any educator. "These children are bundles of wonderful energy," she says. "But we catch them at the right time." After taking a break to raise her daughter, Fay-Zenk returned to the Cupertino Union School District in 1989, teaching math at Miller.

Her first stint as the district's math resource teacher lasted from 1993 to 1997, which is when she began working closely with CEEF. "We took on a fundraising campaign," Watanabe says, "and she went to corporations and wrote grants. We ended up raising $250,000 for the district's math programs." Watanabe says Fay-Zenk's efforts helped Cupertino schools improve its math program to the level of national acclaim it enjoys today. After several years teaching in the regular classroom and training student teachers, Fay-Zenk returned to the position several years ago.

The innovation Fay-Zenk demonstrates won her CEEF's recognition, but one of her favorite things is getting back into the classroom to see the fruits of her labor. She and Miller math teacher Pallavi Shah co-teach a supplementary math class for seventh- and eighth-grade students, fostering the mathematical intrigue that recently won Miller first place in the team competition at the national MATHCOUNTS contest.