Jason Kamras, the 2005 National Teacher of the Year, says he "decided early on" that he wanted to be a teacher. He has spent the past nine years teaching seventh, eighth, and ninth grade students at John Philip Sousa Middle School in Washington, D.C., where he developed a digital photography program to make the students more aware of the world around them and to impart, in a practical way, lessons in mathematics.

"Teaching is very demanding work, very difficult," he tells associate editor Michael Bandler, "but the opportunity to work with my children is one I cherish every day." Bandler is a writer for the State Department's Bureau of International Information Programs.

He could have been a zoologist. That piqued his curiosity in the seventh grade.

He could have been a businessman, or an attorney, or a specialist in international affairs—other pursuits that he briefly considered at one time or another. But Jason Kamras chose teaching as a profession, and focused his attention, even while a college undergraduate, on the inner city.

"I decided early on," he explains, "that I wanted to be a part of the process of extending educational opportunity to all children, which I believe is their birthright."

And so he joined the faculty of an inner city school—one of the most daunting challenges of all on the American educational landscape—in the nation's capital, Washington, D.C.

In April 2005, Kamras achieved an enviable milestone when President Bush named him the 2005 National Teacher of the Year, the oldest and most prestigious award for elementary and secondary school educators in the United States. He is the 55th winner, and the first from a school in the District of Columbia.

Kamras, who is a mathematics teacher and instructional specialist (mentor to less experienced teachers) at John Philip Sousa Middle School in Washington, D.C., has taught sixth, seventh, and eighth graders during his nine-year tenure at Sousa. Among his innovations has been EXPOSE, a program in which students learn to use digital cameras, edit images, and work with digital video software to fashion autobiographical photo-essays about their lives and their communities.

Kamras was born in New York City but grew up from the age of three in Sacramento, California. He graduated from Rio Americano High School there, then attended Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, where he received his undergraduate degree. He began teaching at Sousa under the auspices of Teach for America, a national, nonprofit organization that recruits top university graduates and asks them to commit themselves to teaching two years at inner city or rural schools in mostly poor communities, where it often is difficult to fill teaching positions. When his two years ended, Kamras remained at Sousa, leaving only for the 1999-2000 academic year to earn a master's degree in education at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Recently, he discussed his career choice, and his perspectives on the evolution of his students.

Q: What are the opportunities facing adolescents—kids entering their teenage years—today in the United States?

A: They have so many extraordinary opportunities. What is amazing about this country is that when children have the opportunity to have an excellent education, they can go on to do almost anything they would like to do. So I think it's a very exciting time, that age, to know you have that future waiting for you.

Q: You began teaching, actually, when you were at Princeton.

A: Yes, I tutored elementary students in Trenton, New Jersey, and also individuals who were in a New Jersey correctional facility. I also spent a summer as a VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) volunteer in Sacramento, California, where I grew up.

Q: And your mother taught.

A: Yes. She taught in New York City.

Q: And she was an inspiration for your career choice?

A: She was one of them. I recall her speaking quite fondly of her classes and her students, while I was growing up. But my own experiences teaching while in college, and in the summer as a VISTA volunteer, were very formative, in particular because I was working in underserved areas. The inequities in our public education system became very apparent to me. I actually believe those inequities are the greatest social challenge facing our country today.

Q: What drew you to the particular age group with whom you've been working for most of your career? You signed up first with Teach for America, and they usually place you in an underserved school. Did you have a choice of age group?

A: I was always drawn to secondary school education—[grades] seven to 12. This middle school opening became available to me. I thought about it for a while, whether I wanted to do it, rather than teaching in high school. I decided it's a really interesting age. My students are very much still children, but they're beginning to develop their true self-identity entering adulthood. So it's a very interesting time to work with children, and I really like being at that nexus point while I'm working with them.

Q: The key is growing up.

A: Absolutely.

Q: You know, it hasn't been that long since you were growing up—18 years or so. What's different today from the time of your own development?

A: It's a difficult question. When you look back at your own adolescence, you don't always have an accurate picture of how things actually were.

Q: Well, let's put it this way: Is this a good time for kids to grow up in America?

A: I think it's a challenging time. I don't think that adolescence is ever not challenging, and so I think my students do face a lot of difficulties in their lives, in particular. But they have an incredibly positive outlook on things, and are incredibly resilient. One of the most inspiring things about them is their positive view of the future.

Q: When you first walked into the classroom years back—kids being kids— they must have looked the new

guy over. How did you win their confidence, win them over to your side?

A: One of the things I suggest to new teachers as they enter the classroom is to demonstrate that they're really serious about the business of learning, and about setting a high standard for the students and the classroom. That immediately sets a tone of "we're really going to achieve this year." Children actually want that. They're thirsting for that push, for that order, for that notion that someone is going to lead them in a very systematic way. But then there are also all sorts of other things you can do—spending time with children outside the classroom, going to chess tournaments and basketball games, making home visits, getting to know the families, so that you do develop a sense of rapport and trust that you can then draw upon in the classroom.

Q: What are the challenges facing kids today in their daily lives and daily routines that are important for you, as a teacher, to keep in mind?

A: Like all children, they deal with the challenges of finding out who they are. That is the age when they begin to develop a sense of their own identity. I think that's an extremely turbulent time. That is the primary challenge for any adolescent in this country. If you ask any adult to look back, he or she can recall very difficult experiences while negotiating social changes and physical changes, and deciding which crowd to be part of. You mentioned the digital age. There are advantages and disadvantages to that. I'm still fairly young, but it does seem that the pace of our culture has accelerated a great deal—everything from news to the video games, everything along that spectrum. It's a less reflective culture, and that may be something our children are missing as they grow up.

Q: How do you try to get them to be more reflective?

A: You can textualize mathematics and make it relevant to their lives. It forces reflection [on] its application. It's true in non-academic areas, too—just talking with them, taking the time to listen, and slow down and have a conversation.

Q: Talk for a moment about the role of parents, in terms of school and academics. How do you involve them in the lives of their kids?

A: It starts with phone calls and letters home, home visits, meeting family members, sitting down and spending some time, having parents come into class and participate, making myself available before and after school to discuss anything that's going on with their child, really making every possible effort to establish those lines of communication. It's crucial for parents or guardians to be involved. We actually need to do more to make schools welcoming for them.

Q: Tell me about the program you've initiated, EXPOSE. I know that during your year at Harvard, you conceived educational ideas like that one.

A: EXPOSE is a digital photography program for the seventh- and eighth-grade students in my school. The genesis was, first, that I had always loved photography and wanted to share that with my students. At the same time, when I came to the school, I was struck by two phenomena: one, that most people living in the Washington region did not know very much about my children, other than what they would read in the newspaper; and two, my students, for a variety of reasons, didn't really have the chance to take advantage of all the opportunities in the city. I wanted to create some way to bring these two worlds together. So I thought photography would be a good way to do that. We'd take the students on field trips so they got to see more of the city, and we also had the students—using digital photography—create autobiographical photo essays that they then shared with the larger public. So, through these two mechanisms, there was an exchange across the city.

It also was a great way to teach math. When you talk about angle of view, it's geometry. Shutter speeds are fractional comparisons. Pixels per inch are ratios. We started with black-and-white film, and now we're all digital. There also was a double math initiative. I came to the conclusion that to really push achievement, we needed to double the amount of instructional time for mathematics. So I proposed that to my principal, and we worked out a system whereby every student has two math classes a day. There are two separate courses being taught, but all students take both of those courses—the idea being that each teacher can slow down and focus on a smaller number of objectives and thereby really get much more in depth. And student retention goes up.

Q: Talk for a minute about some of the things you learned at Harvard while pursuing your master's degree.

A: The math program came out of that experience. I also did some work with educational software design, and I was able to integrate that into some of my photography programs, which made them a little richer. I also did some work on differentiation of instruction, and was able to use that in my classroom as well.

Q: Let's go back, for a minute, to what influenced your choice of an inner-city school.

A: I'm still in the school in which I taught during Teach for America. I believe that education is the cornerstone of opportunity in this country, and there are too many children, particularly from low-income communities, who do not have access to an excellent education and are therefore being denied opportunity. So I decided early on that I wanted to be a part of this process of extending that opportunity to all children, which I believe is their birthright.

Q: How do you spot a child in crisis when it isn't immediately or overtly discernible?

A: I think when you spend enough time with children, you develop a sense of what their normal operating equilibrium is. And then you can begin to tell when they're deviating from that—either up or down. It's different for every child; what might be a signal for one is completely benign for somebody else. So after you spend that time and develop that rapport, you begin to develop a keen awareness of when something doesn't seem right.

Q: Can you pinpoint an example?

A: I have a student I'm very close with who was in my first sixth-grade class in 1996. As a fresh teacher that year, I was really challenged by him. He was often, as they say in education, "off-task." And I had great difficulty handling that. But I realized, after talking with him, that I wasn't challenging him enough. So I started working with him after school, to develop a rapport. We played chess, and he actually would routinely defeat me. By no means am I a great chess player—but he was 11 years old! We continued to work together throughout sixth grade. I didn't teach him in seventh or eighth grade, but we continued to work after school, and I developed a good relationship with his mother as well. He ended up as valedictorian of the school, and I continued working with him throughout high school. He just finished his sophomore year at Morehouse College in Atlanta [Georgia]. He's an electrical engineering major, and he's thinking about doing a joint master's [degree] program with the Columbia University School of Engineering [in New York City].

Q: On balance, after working nearly a decade in education, do America's kids still fill you with a sense of wonder regarding possibilities?

A: Absolutely! Absolutely! Unequivocally. Teaching is very demanding work, very difficult, but the opportunity to work with my children is one I cherish every day. They are incredibly bright, incredibly dynamic, and creative, and resilient. There's honestly no group of people I'd rather get up in the morning to see every day.

The opinions expressed in this interview do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.