The Secret Life of an Ambitious Math Tutor by Alex

The Secret Life of an Ambitious Math Tutor by Alex - August 2017 Scholarship Essay

For years now I’ve tutored and taught and tutored math at all levels. It was only recently that I began allowing students to pay me, but it was always just something I did because I liked it. Math is fun. Watching other people have the light bulb moment is fun, it’s like watching the slowest friend in the group finally get that joke you told, only if the joke was a math problem about how quickly water drains from a tank. Maybe it’s not glamorous, but neither are crossword puzzles and sudokus, and nobody gets made fun of for their lack of puzzles.
I’ve always wanted the opportunity to teach calculus in a class setting, for two main reasons. I hate how math is presented. Either it feels like we met up at a funeral home to talk about integrals, or some (well intentioned) guy thought he could turn logarithmic differentiation into an episode of The Wiggles. I don’t see what the problem is with honest enthusiasm, it doesn’t have to be corny or insufferable. I want to present math in a way that says it’s okay to enjoy it, and it’s useful even if you don’t.
The second reason is that the students I work with lack a fundamental basis in precalculus. I’ve seen too many kids drop calculus classes not because they couldn’t do the calculus, but because they couldn’t do the algebra. I think a mathematics education should be accessible to everyone regardless of what they had available to them in high school.
Finally, I just want an excuse to wear one of those microphones on my clothing. Sorry to wreck your childhood dreams, but people can have other motives besides altruism. I think those lecturers look so cool and official with a battery pack on their waistband and tangled wires meandering up to their face, maybe even a styrofoam cup of coffee (not to drink from, just as a prop).
It will probably never happen, but perhaps my most common daydream is of my life as a math professor.