Today’s humble badass is Brenda Ortiz-Torres.  Brenda is a middle school math teacher in Thornton, Colorado who is working on developing a community-based math curriculum to bring more relevance and connection to the subject.  She is also a recipient of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which has allowed her to experience opportunities that she at one point didn’t know would be possible.

In our conversation, Brenda opens up about the challenges of growing up as an undocumented citizen and how she she developed a persistence to not give up in order to make her family who had made many sacrifices proud.  She talks about the pressures she felt to assimilate to the American culture and how her experiences in school, particularly math, weren’t always positive.  She identifies what changed in her mindset about math and education and why she decided to join the teaching profession in order to give students relevant experiences.