Hi, I'm Karen - the Math Sister. 

I'm a math teacher living in Lehi, Utah, with my husband and our two kids. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and came to Utah to attend Brigham Young University, then stayed when I married a boy from Utah.

Why Math?

Unlike many people, I've almost always found math to be easy and fun. When I was around five or six years old, my grandpa, an electrical engineer, started teaching me math facts. It started off with memorizing squares: 2 squared is 4, 5 squared is 25, 9 squared is 81, etc. Once those were memorized, we moved on to cubes. In school, I was only just learning to multiply and divide, but I could tell you that 7 cubed was 343.

It didn't stop with squares and cubes—Grandpa also taught me other concepts that I wouldn't officially learn until years later. He had me memorize that "sine is the side opposite over the hypotenuse"—never mind that I didn't know a hypotenuse from a hippopotamus. He taught me that (a+b)² is a²+ b² + 2ab. And to keep me entertained while he chatted with his friends at the diner, he gave me simple algebra problems like 5 + ___ = 17 to do on the paper napkins.

Because of the leg up Grandpa gave me, I advanced quickly through the math programs at my school. I was the only fifth grader in a pre-algebra class that took place before school two mornings a week with a bunch of sixth graders. The following year, I did Algebra 1 independent study while my classmates worked on their math. In high school, I took AP Calculus AB as a junior; senior year I took both AP Calculus BC and AP Statistics - as one of only two students at my school to juggle both AP math classes at once - and achieved the highest possible score (a 5) on the AP tests for both. That same year, my calculus teacher hired me to be a tutor a few days a week to the students in the lower math classes. I also helped my classmates when they got stuck on our assignments, and was told multiple times that "you explain it better than the teacher does."

In college, I was hired as a freshman to work as a tutor in the campus Math Lab, and worked there for three years until the time came to do the student teaching for my Math Education major. I also did some private tutoring on the side for students who needed a little more help than the lab could provide. I loved helping students with the concepts that hadn't made sense to them when they were taught in class.

After graduating, I started teaching math for an online school. I taught online for nine years, and my favorite part of the job was working with students. After an unexpected layoff, I decided to return to private tutoring full-time to focus on the part of teaching that I loved best.

Why Sister?

I'm the oldest of seven children. One of them is only sixteen months younger than me, so I have no memory of a time before I held the title of “sister.”

As my younger siblings went through high school, they each hit a point where they surpassed both of our parents' ability to help them out with their math. Luckily, since I had already passed through those same classes, I was able to be a resource to my siblings when they got stuck. Similarly, I have helped other family members when they've struggled with math. I taught my sister-in-law Geometry to help her prep for the ACT, and I’ve helped multiple cousins with their math classes as well.

Since being an older sister has been such a major part of my life, the name “Math Sister” just felt right as I started my blog and business. My goal is to treat every student with the love and care that I would give my own family.