Not Just Teaching, but Passing it On…

A few years ago I had the privilege of teaching math for the Upward Bound program at Midland College. It really appealed to me to have the opportunity to teach math and computers to high school students. The fact that I am not an educator by profession, however, did make me slightly nervous.

The students at that time were being relentlessly drilled in school on the information necessary to pass the TAKS test, the standardized test here in Texas that would determine if they advanced a grade and/or even if they would graduate!

I hate standardized tests… but that’s another topic entirely. Maybe one day I’ll discuss my opinion about that.

So I wanted to go in and teach them something completely different. I didn’t want to repeat to them the topics that were going to be “on the test” – I wanted to bring in some real-world perspective. I wanted to teach them some things about math that their school teachers otherwise weren’t given the time to do.

I “wanted to” do a lot, that was for sure. The question was, how to make a memorable impact on them.

So this is what I did. I think it was pretty effective.

At the beginning of one of our Saturday morning classroom sessions I told my students that I needed help solving a math problem. I walked up to the dry erase board and began to write. It took me about a minute to transpose the math problem from paper to the board.

(Hehe, it had taken me longer than that to transpose it from the Calculus book I had in my closet the night before, and even longer to find one that I was confident they couldn’t solve!)

I saw the students’ faces go from eagerness to help to disappointment in record time when I turned around to face them. The huge Calculus integral on the board was a problem that even I wasn’t sure how to solve.

Then, I sprung my idea…

I told them I needed some help solving this problem all right. Then I pulled out my wallet and held up five crisp $20 bills and said that I was willing to pay someone for the answer to my problem.

(At the same time, I prayed there weren’t any Calculus geniuses in the room that could solve a third-year college Calculus problem!)

What was the reaction? A lot of them complained and said that it was unfair, that it was too hard of a problem for them to solve in order to get the money. That’s where the life lesson came in…

I told them that there were people out in the world with similar math problems. They might not be problems out of the back of a math book, but problems that corporations, businesses, or the government might have. Regardless of who has the problem, they are usually willing to pay big bucks to the person or persons that can solve them.

Hence the importance of an education. In this example, I explained that if someone had a math degree, he or she could walk up to the board, solve the problem, and put $100 in their pocket for about 2 minutes of work.

Then I asked how long someone would have to work at a fast food restaurant to earn the same amount of money.

I hope I got my point across that day. Pursue your education. Period.

Teaching those Upward Bound students was one of the most memorable experiences of my life. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing many of them on Facebook complete their educations, get married, start families, and otherwise excel at life.

To those former students of mine I would like to say: the privilege and the honor was mine to have you in my classes.