Grand Rapids teacher Aaron Fillenworth is in the running to become America’s Favorite Teacher. If he wins, he’ll get a $25,000 prize, an all-inclusive trip and more.
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — A true pick-me-up for all of West Michigan: There’s a Grand Rapids math teacher competing against hundreds of other teachers across the country for the title of America’s Favorite Teacher.
The race is already down to the quarterfinals, but this is still some pretty stiff competition.
“Quarterfinals – I was thinking March Madness, bracket style, there’s like four or five of us left, and then I went to the page, and I saw that there’s still about, I counted a hundred – the math side of me, I had to count. There was 128 quarterfinal groups with 10 people in each. So, there’s roughly over 1,200 people still in the contest,” said Aaron Fillenworth, who teaches pre-algebra to seventh and eighth graders at City High Middle School with Grand Rapids Public Schools.
He’s up against hundreds of teachers in this nationwide competition.
He says he came across the “America’s Favorite Teacher” competition one day while scrolling through social media on his phone.
He’s feeling confident after winning “Teacher of the Year” in his first year with City High.
Five years later, he’s still teaching kids math and many other valuable lessons.
“I know a lot of people always come to me and say, ‘Oh, math’s not my favorite subject,’ or ‘I struggle with math.’ I want to make that more approachable for them. But more so than anything, I tell students that I’m not a math teacher, I’m a life teacher,” he said. “At the end of the day, I don’t know when the next time is that they’re going to need the Pythagorean Theorem but I have a good feeling at some point in their life they’re going to need to communicate, collaborate and work together on a project with somebody else whether it be high school, college or the workforce. So, just building those positive people skills and that’s really been a focus of mine from day one.”
The next round of voting ends Thursday, April 17, at 10 p.m. Everyone gets one free vote and can pay for additional votes.
He really needs your help because he has to be in first place to move forward.
The teacher with the most votes from each of the 128 groups will then go on to the semi-finals.
Click here to vote for Fillenworth.
The grand prize for the teacher who wins it all is: $25,000, an all-inclusive trip for two to Hawaii, a feature article and photoshoot in Readers Digest and a virtual school assembly with Bill Nye the Science Guy.