Rajon Rondo Is a Better Math Teacher Than You

Rajon Rondo photo courtesy of Jeremiah E. Burke High School

On Tuesday, Kehinde Oshodi, a teacher at Dorchester’s Jeremiah E. Burke High School, noticed a new face in her first-period algebra class. After taking a closer look, she says she “… did a double take.” Her new student was Rajon Rondo.

The Celtics point guard visited Burke that morning, toured around the school with headmaster Lindsa McIntyre, met some students in the cafeteria, and tagged along with them to math. At 9:18 a.m., Rondo tweeted:

Teaching freshman algebra with Ms. Oshodi at Burke high school this AM. Thx for having me twitter.com/RajonRondo/sta…

— Rajon Rondo (@RajonRondo) November 6, 2012

As a teenager, Rondo was a math wiz. But what is he like as a teacher? A pretty good one, according to Oshodi. Soon after arriving at Oshodi’s classroom, he paged through a textbook, got paper and a pen, and quickly solved the first equation Oshodi wrote on the white board. At that point, Rond0 said, “give me more problems.”

Oshodi obliged, and within a few minutes, Rondo was in front of the class, explaining how he figured out the value of “X” in the equation “5X = 70.”

“When he saw how the students had [solved] it, he said ‘I did it differently,'” Oshodi said. Rondo then broke down his method by saying that in his head, he went back to his multiplication tables, telling himself that 5 x 12 is 60 and 5 x 2 is 10. Add 12 and 2, he said, and you get 14, the answer. He made sure to acknowledge that there are often different ways to solve a single problem.

“He did it his way,” Oshodi said, “but he also showed a connection between his work and the students’ work.” It’s not a surprise that Rondo, as he put it, “did it differently.” Anybody who’s watched him play knows that’s his specialty.

After spending some time with Oshodi’s class, Rondo had to go. Oshodi forgot to ask for an autograph before he left, but she came away impressed with his teaching skills. “He got into it,” she said. “Students saw that he really knows his stuff.”