Adam Fried

Adam Fried is a freshman math teacher who has worked at the high school for eight years. He grew up in Lexington and continues to live in the Boston area. He majored in math in college at first, but then switched his major to art history. During quarantine, his favorite activity
has been playing social deception games, like Among Us, with his friends. He has also been playing through every game on the Nintendo 64.

What do you like to do in your free time?

When the world exists, I like going to do pub trivia. I’m in an online trivia league that’s got 20,000 people all over the world who compete. The weekend before lockdown, so the first weekend in March, I skipped school on Friday because I was in Chicago at a trivia competition. So I do that kind of seriously, and I’m one of the faculty advisors for the Quiz Bowl team for the school. I like golf in all forms. Playing disc golf is a great way to get outside and hang out with friends and throw things as far as you can. Ball golf, also known as just golf, I enjoy as well. Video games, board games, mostly dorky things.

How was your experience at Old Lincoln School (OLS) last year? Was it different from teaching at the high school?

I was nervous going into it. It ended up being really amazing. We just totally built our own community over there. We have this motto of “we create the culture that we want,” and we got to really create the culture that we wanted for 9th grade. I got to collaborate so much more with teachers from other departments. We were on the same hallway as English teachers, and back at 115, English is a mile away from us. We’re just in totally different universes. So it was really cool to just be able to wander around the halls and stop in Mr. Dickerman’s history class and see what they were doing.

Do you have any advice for your 9th grade self?

Don’t assume that you don’t like someone without actually meeting them and getting to know them. Don’t assume that because you have different interests on the surface that you can’t become great friends. This is your one shot at high school, so you might as well get to know these people. I found that there were people who I wasn’t friends with in high school, because I didn’t allow that to happen, who later on in life I ended up being roommates with in my 20s. I’m best friends with them now, and I look back on it, we could’ve such great times in high school, and we could’ve been friends this whole time.

What would you say to people who aren’t interested in math?

Honestly, the best way to get interested in math is to just not do high school math. That sounds terrible to say, but no mathematicians sit around and talk about how fun Algebra II is. That doesn’t happen. Math teachers sit around, and when we talk about math, we aren’t talking about the quadratic formula, that’s so boring and dry. We are talking about weird interesting and goofy problems that catch our attention and we can’t help but think about. That’s what I encourage people to do. Find new angles, not literally geometry angles, but find new ways of looking at math that intrigue you.