Amy Bigelow found her calling as a math instructor before she even graduated from college! A mathematics major at Middlebury College, Amy studied abroad in the Math in Moscow program, where she mentored special needs children whose school shared the same building and volunteered for the summer at Svetlana Village, an organic farm and therapeutic community for adults with developmental disabilities. That semester in Russia, she formulated her life’s dream: to become a special education math teacher, serving both gifted and talented students and children who struggled with numeracy.

Upon graduating, she joined the Teach Kentucky corps to teach middle school math in the inner city while earning her Master of Arts in Teaching from the University of Louisville. After three years as a public school educator, Amy began looking for schools that shared her values of encouraging students’ strengths, pushing them as far as possible, and treating others with kindness. A chance email from Franklin Academy revealed that her dream job actually existed.

Amy is now starting her 20th year as a mathematics educator. She has since secured CT teaching licenses in K-12 Special Education and 5-12 Mathematics and earned an M.Phil from Wesleyan University, where she was awarded the Rulewater Prize “for outstanding reflection and writing on an interdisciplinary topic” for her thesis Understanding the Rubik’s Cube Group. She was also honored with a 2017 Edyth May Sliffe Award for Distinguished Mathematics Teaching by the Mathematics Association of America and was selected for the Museum of Mathematics’s 2024 Rosenthal Prize Summer Institute. 

She has presented at several National Council of Teachers of Mathematics conferences and collaborated with pre-service teachers at Illinois State University through an REU/RET to present their graph theory research at the Midwest Conference on Combinatorics, Cryptography, and Computing. She has served as AP Reader for Calculus, Computer Science Principles, and Statistics and is certified to offer UConn dual enrollment courses from Discrete Mathematics through Multivariable Calculus, Statistics, and Computer Science. Amy serves as a peer reviewer for Mathematics Teacher: Learning and Teaching Pre-K to 12 and a judge for the American Statistical Association Grades 7-12 Project Competition. 

At Franklin, she is proud of the wealth of creative course offerings in the math department, customized each year to students’ needs (from the Art of Math to Programming-based Cryptography) and the math team’s success as Regional Champions in the New England Math League the past three years. Aside from math, she has traveled with students to West Virginia, the Grand Canyon, Washington D.C., and Japan, and coordinates the Franklin Fun Run and Trivia Night. She is currently on a quest to run a race in every town in Connecticut and every road in East Haddam.