Choreographing the fun in math

At the ripe age of 6, Raeanna Deloge ’25 was certain.

It was career day at school, and she replicated a classic teacher outfit, donning a button-down shirt, vest, and skirt, accessorizing with a ruler to complete the ensemble. At that moment, Deloge knew she wanted to be a teacher.

Now, Deloge is on her way to making that dream reality. She is the first, and currently only, mathematics education major at Clark, and hopes to teach algebra — her favorite kind of math — to middle schoolers.

“Middle school is a unique age because students are old enough to understand a lot about the world and a lot about themselves, but they still have so much to learn,” says Deloge, who has applied to pursue a Master of Arts in Teaching in the 4+1 Accelerated Master’s Degree Program.

“If I could spend the rest of my life teaching algebra, I think I’d be fully happy,” she adds. “There’s something satisfying about going through all these steps to get a concrete solution.”

The energy and enthusiasm of her middle school math teacher got Deloge hooked on the subject. Class assignments were much more engaging than a typical worksheet. Deloge fondly remembers a lesson on graph transformations in which students started by printing cartoon characters on a small grid and then scaled up the size, drawing 6-foot-tall versions of the character on massive paper. She wants to replicate this kind of creativity in her own classroom.

Deloge is used to fielding the question, “Why math?” Some aspiring teachers hesitate to pursue the subject.

“A lot of people didn’t have great experiences learning math growing up because the subject is usually very rigid,” she says. “If I can find ways to make math interesting for students, hopefully more people will want to be math teachers.”

She intends to go beyond explaining the common real-life applications for math, such as fractions in baking or addition at the grocery store check-out.

“There’s a lot of math in other fields, especially biology, chemistry, even the social sciences, which frequently use surveys,” she says. “I want to find ways to show that math does exist in the real world, but in ways that will be relevant to whatever students want to go into someday.”

Deloge sees math applied in seemingly unusual places, like in classes for her dance minor.

“Dance and math overlap more than you think,” she says. “Dance has counts and formations. If you want to get down to the nitty-gritty of it, understanding alignment and geometry can play a role in dance, which I think is really cool.”

It works the other way around, too.

“Dance offers creativity that I can blend into how I view math,” she says. “Dance is incredibly open-ended in the sense that many kinds of movement can be viewed as dance. My understanding is that dance and math have multiple lenses. Yes, you can follow a basic formula and get a solution, but you can also go at it 47 other ways and still get that same solution at the end of the day.”

Deloge primarily studies under dance Professor Audra Carabetta and practices ballet, tap, modern, jazz, and contemporary. She’s been dancing since she was a toddler.

On campus, Deloge serves as club treasurer for Dance Society, Hip Hop Collabo, and Diversity and Inclusion in Mathematics. She’s also a competition team choreographer at Freeform Dance Academy in Westminster, Massachusetts.

Major in mathematics education