About Jaliyla Fraser
CEO & Math Consultant
Hi! My name is Jaliyla Fraser and I am the CEO and founder of Fraser’s Mathematics Solutions (FMS), where we provide comprehensive professional development, create and align math curricula, design culturally relevant math and STEAM programs, and created the Dope Math Notebook.
Although I graduated valedictorian of my elementary, middle, and high school class, I failed my first few math classes in college, lost all of my academic scholarships, and had to transfer schools because I could no longer afford it. As a declared math major, I learned very quickly that this was going to be a lonely journey as I was the only black girl in my math classes. Not to mention, my Discrete Math professor did a great job of making me feel small as he casually solved permutation and combination math problems on the board while saying “you should know this” or “why don’t you know this.”
Now coming from a Caribbean household - as I was born in Trinidad and came to the United States when I was a baby - feeling small is indirectly proportional to my culture. While I didn’t know it at the time, the low self-esteem that I felt started my rebirth into the best math educator that I’ve always wanted to have. I transferred schools, redeclared my major, earned my B.S. in Secondary Math Education in 2008 from Temple University, my M.A. in 2009 from Columbia University in Math Education, and my certificate to teach physics in 2011. I vowed that my students would never say that their teacher “didn’t teach me this.”
My vast experiences as a high school math and physics teacher, K-12 district Math Supervisor, math professor, math textbook editor, mathematics advisor, computer science advisory board member, and author of a national math guidance document has fully prepared me to be the CEO of my own disruptive math and STEM educational company. Fraser’s Mathematics Solutions is for every child that was told they couldn’t do math.
My philosophy is grounded in the belief that mathematics can be accessible to all students if there is a clear and meaningful connection to their previous learning and the real-world. Exposure to mathematics should be rich and grounded in concrete experiences that bridge to the abstract. Mathematics is a true passion of mine and I am constantly looking for new ways to inject that same passion into all stakeholders that I support.