Who is this Mr. Burrus guy?
I'm Charlie Burrus, and this is my first year on the Westbury Faculty.
I grew up here in Houston, and went to HISD public schools. I attended Will Rogers Elementary, River Oaks Elementary, Lanier Middle School, Lamar High School and Bellaire High School. I spent my 9th grade year in Germany, and went to Argentina for a year as an AFS exchange student when I was a senior. The picture on the right is my 11th grade yearbook picture.
Yeah, laugh if you want to, but it was the 70's and we all looked kind of like that back then.
I went to college at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. It's a small, private college that is part of the Ivy League. It was a big change for me, coming from public schools in Houston. But I learned a whole lot, and I'm glad I went there.
I didn't study math very much at Dartmouth. But I studied a lot of other things, and graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Spanish language and literature. It wasn't until I returned home to Houston that I started seriously studying math. I went to the University of Houston where I got my teaching certification and Master's degree in applied mathematics.
I taught at Bellaire High School and Sharpstown High School in the late 80's and early 90's. I taught Algebra 1, Algebra 2, Geometry, PreCalculus, Calculus, and a couple of other classes that we don't offer any more. I even taught a couple of Spanish courses (although I have to tell you I'm better at teaching math than I am at teaching Spanish). After a few years I decided I would try something other than teaching. So I worked as an actuarial consultant for Watson Wyatt and Company for a little over 7 years. If you're wondering what an actuarial consultant does, then I'll tell you very briefly: we did lots of calculations that would estimate the amount of money that a company would need to save each year to be able to afford to pay its employees their retirement benefits in the future. It was interesting work for a while, but I missed the interactive atmosphere of the classroom.
I came back to teaching in January of 2003, first at César Chavez High School, then at Westside High School. I then spent two years working for the Rice University School Mathematics Project, which is a program that is committed to improving math education in the Houston area. Again, I missed the classroom environment, so this year I find myself here at Westbury. I'm very excited about the school, and about the classes that I'm teaching: AP Statistics and Algebra II.
The picture at the right is what I look like now.
I'm in room B220. You may email me at cburrus@houstonisd.org. If you prefer leaving phone messages, you can call the school--I'm at extension 386. I'm pretty good at answering both email and voicemail. If you need help with anything or need to talk to me for any reason, come by my class before or after school.
If you like college football, check out my computer rankings. In trying to come up with a way to judge teams without bias I developed this algorithm, which I think works pretty well.