This past September, many Peddie students enrolled in AP Calculus BC or MPS2 walked into their math classrooms to meet one of our newest teachers on campus: Mr. Chad Miller. This year marks his 24th year in education.
Mr. Miller brings a wealth of experience and skill to Peddie. Growing up in the suburbs of Indianapolis, Indiana, he became aware of his academic interests at a young age. “I was strong in math, I was strong in Spanish,” he recalled, ultimately earning an Academic Honors Diploma.
After graduating from high school, Mr. Miller intended to major in business. But those plans would soon change after he arrived on the campus of Millsaps College in Mississippi.
“I went there and took zero business classes,” he laughed. Instead, he became drawn to mathematics classes and concepts, including differential equations, abstract algebra, real analysis and graph theory. It quickly became his major.
He would also add a double major in Spanish, a decision spurred on by a nontraditional college experience. “The biggest moment during college was when I went to this study abroad program called Semester at Sea … there were 600 kids on one big ship and we sailed around the world,” he recalled. The ship stopped at ten different countries, including Costa Rica, helping him develop both a varied worldview and improved Spanish skills.
Soon after graduating from Millsaps, he began his first teaching job in calculus with the Indianapolis Public Schools. “I was a 22-year-old teaching 18-year-olds,” he recalled.
Over the next 23 years, he would gain varied experience across a multitude of schools in Indiana, Mississippi and Florida. He taught at inner-city high schools, a Native American school, and most recently, at an independent day school in Florida.
“You think you know calculus until you’re forced to teach it to somebody else,” Mr. Miller noted of his varied teaching experiences across classes like calculus, algebra, geometry, pre-calculus, and Spanish.
It was during his time in Florida when he also began to gravitate towards a problem-based approach to math. “Around 2018, we were all reading about getting kids at the boards, one marker per group … a very organized structure to the class,” he recalled. “I started doing as much of that as I could.”
This philosophy influenced his ultimate decision to come to Peddie after learning about its problem-based system that forms the foundation of our mathematics curriculum.
“When I met with a couple of administrators here and chatted about how they teach math, I was like, this is a good fit … especially when I met with Mr. Koch, I think it seemed like mutual excitement that he had somebody who also valued whiteboards and challenging problems.”
So far, Mr. Miller has been enjoying Peddie’s boarding school environment. Whether it’s as a member of the morning faculty gym group, a calculus teacher, a Girls JV Soccer coach or dorm supervisor in Potter North, he can be counted on to be fully immersed in the Peddie community.
“The boarding school experience, I’m really liking it,” he smiled.
