Oceanside teacher explains math concepts by applying them to students' lives

Oceanside High School math teacher Rocio Saborido has seen students struggle to grasp math concepts such as half-life and exponential functions. So she developed a lesson that makes these concepts easier for students by applying them to calculating the impact of caffeinated energy drinks on their health.

“They [the students] don’t know what they’re drinking, and they don’t know how much their limit should be,” said Saborido, 45, of Port Washington.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that those between ages 12 to 18 consume no more than 100 milligrams of caffeine daily; popular energy drinks such as Monster contain as much as 160 milligrams, Saborido said.

She added that the mathematical and health messages “hit home” with a classroom demonstration using bowls of water and food coloring to illustrate how long the caffeine takes to break down — a process known as half-life.

“Now they can calculate how long it takes for them to have less than one milligram of caffeine in their bloodstream — about 35 hours,” she said.

Nicola Doolan, 18, of Oceanside, who studied with Saborido in her sophomore and junior years, said via text message, “I remember being genuinely shocked at how long caffeine stays in your system, completely changing how I thought about caffeine and energy drinks.”

Saborido said she always loved puzzles and that math was a constant when her family traveled frequently between her birthplace, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, and the United States.

“With all the moving back and forth between countries, math is so nice and international,” Saborido said. “It’s the same everywhere.”

The family eventually settled in Woodhaven, Queens. Saborido earned a bachelor of science in mathematics from Queens College, CUNY, in Flushing. She was in the second class of students to earn a degree through the college’s TIME 2000 (Teaching Improvements through Mathematics Education) secondary mathematics teacher-preparation program.

Saborido, who began teaching at Oceanside High School in 2023, has

an “incredible gift for making complex math come alive,” said fellow mathematics teacher Michelle Rinaldi, a colleague for more than 20 years. Rinaldo said that Saborido also teaches lessons that also incorporate Barbie dolls and making waffles to help “students at all levels connect mathematical concepts to the real world.”

Since Saborido introduced her energy drink lesson in 2007, she has demonstrated the lesson for the past 15 years to students in a graduate methods course at Queens College, presented it at a Queens College conference for high school seniors, and last month published an article in Mathematics Teacher: Learning and Teaching PK-12, a journal of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.

Nominate the passionate, engaging and innovative educators of Long Island to be featured in our Teacher Spotlight series by sending details to LILife@Newsday.com.