Algebra by Bailey

Algebra by Bailey - July 2014 Scholarship Essay

As a student I have always had an admiration for math teachers. No matter the type of math, the instructors always seemed to be the people that I looked up to the most. Knowing all of the information that they have to teach us, and being able to solve all of the problems that their students get stuck on just amazes me. Math has never been a subject that I have really struggled in. Always doing my homework and paying attention in class I understood just about everything and didn't find math to be difficult at all. Well at least not until algebra. In all math classes everything that you previously knew is generally not hard. I had previously known a lot of the curriculum that was being taught in my algebra class, at least for first semester. When second semester rolled around all that we did was learn new things. Some of it more challenging than other things, and I did not realize how lucky I was to have the teacher that I did. Mr. Renak was an algebra and geometry teacher. It was my junior year of high school and although I struggled at some points, I always seemed to get back on track.

I figured that math my senior year would be a breeze and no more difficult than it had been my junior year. Turns out, I was wrong. Pre-calculus was much harder than I expected. I had a new teacher and just about everything after the first unit was new. My teacher didn't explain things well and she moved too quickly. The minute I felt as though I was starting to get a grasp on something we were learning, the teacher would move to another unit. I became easily frustrated and sought out help by taking a math seminar class so that I could have two people explaining the same things to me incase if I understood one of them better than the other. The seminar class didn't help much and I still didn’t understand the material. Every one learns differently and their styles of teaching were just not cutting it for me. My mom recommended I tutor with Mr. Renak since I always understood his way of teaching. I began to tutor with him and soon enough I was learning all of the things I needed to be learning. Better test grades started showing up and I no longer had the helpless feeling of being so lost in a class that I couldn't find my way through it.

Mr. Renak helped me pull my grade out of the hole I dug myself into and gave me the same confidence I had in algebra, only in my pre-calculus class. We all have that favorite teacher, the one that we get along with best, the one that jokes around with us, but this teacher was not just that for me. He was truly my favorite teacher because of his teaching, and more importantly because he was the kind of teacher that cared enough about all of his students to want each and every one of them to succeed. Mr. Renak is and always will be my favorite teacher.