Michael Le Pere
Huntington Park High School, LAUSD
The best students are teachers. They know the value of learning, they appreciate a good lesson, and usually contribute to the learning process for the entire class. I have seen many teachers become energized in their role as students in our Geometers' Sketchpad (GSP) workshop sessions, and several of them have gone on to become teachers again as workshop leaders themselves.
Nelia (Nellie) Gabriel is a good example. She is a relatively new teacher in the Math department at Huntington Park High School where she taught Geometry for a couple of years before being "invited" to participate in our GSP workshop put on my the Los Angeles Systemic Initiative. In fact, she was still taking classes at CSU Dominguez Hills when she enrolled. As usual, the room was full of high energy, enthusiastic teachers who were having fun learning about Sketchpad's possibilities and imagining what projects they could devise for students back in their classrooms.
The GSP program itself can be used as a demonstration by one or two people per computer. At Huntington Park, Nellie had a Math/Science Resource Room, which is available, with its twenty Macintosh computers, to any of the teachers. 
Predictably, her students were eager learners who mastered many of the powerful functions of GSP by the end of the year. They created an illustrated Geometry Glossary, played havoc with circles, sectors, sections, tangents and all the rest. They produced elegant drawings of Euler's line, with movable triangles; demonstrations of the circumcenter, orthocenter, and incenter, with tables showing the ratios of the parts of the medians as well.
They learned scripting, which allows constructions to be programmed and replayed with different parameters, and they even transferred their more arty creations to paint programs where they created imaginative landscapes or spacescapes or whateverscapes.
After only one year as a GSP user, Nellie was drafted as a GSP workshop co-leader. Her workshop sessions are well received and, because all the workshops are designed to provide a learning experience for all the participants (including the leaders), she doesn't have to carry the class by herself. A common ground for sharing experiences, trading war stories, and eating fresh bagels with friends on a Saturday morning, the workshops are a low-stress way to enhance our skills.
All of us have valuable experiences to share, and all of us need to hear about the new developments in our chosen fields. Join the workshop crowd, and you, too, can become a leader - or at least a coordinator. Just ask Nellie!
