Math... It's Not JAN by Haley

Math... It's Not JAN by Haley - July 2014 Scholarship Essay

“HELLO JAN!!” my teacher screamed at the white board as my fellow classmates and I chuckled while struggling to keep up with the furious notes Mr. H was writing on the board. I couldn’t believe what was happening… I had actually laughed in a math class. A class about math. NUMBERS. I had hated math all my life—it just didn’t come naturally to me like it did to many of my friends. Don’t get me wrong, my grades in math weren’t by any means terrible, but I am the type of person who is much more comfortable writing an essay than I am working a single math problem. But this year, my senior year of high school, everything changed. My calculus class, taught by Mr. H, was my favorite class out of all my subjects. Who knew?!

I’d love to give myself credit for stepping up and re-altering my brain to suddenly love fractions and formulas and all sorts of terrible equations, but the truth is, I had a great teacher. Mr. H cultivated my love for calculus with fun expressions, interesting information, and a new perspective on my childhood enemy. JAN, as mentioned earlier, stands for “just a number,” which is a statement in calculus used to remind students of certain tricks to use when dealing with a number rather than something else when taking the derivative or anti-derivative of an equation. Sounds tricky, but it’s a small example of how my teacher can turn something extremely boring (yet important) into an entertaining experience.

As my calculus teacher AND my study hall teacher, Mr. H was always present and able to motivate me not only in math but in all my classes. He would discuss real-world topics with us and have discussions with his students as if we were adults. It was always so nice to be able to come home and tell my parents not only of the things I had learned about in math that day, but of the new global crisis or political turmoil or a fascinating invention.

Because of all this, I quickly overcame my fear of math and learned to deal with the scary numbers. Mr. H helped me realize what I am capable of not only as a math student but as a human being. Many people will say they had amazing teachers who pushed them to be the best they could be. My teacher did more than that—he treated me (and my other classmates) like an adult so that we could grow for ourselves, without the help of an adult or teacher. I couldn’t ask for anything more from an educator. He went beyond making the course fun—he made math bearable for me and re-vamped my love for learning new things and expanding my knowledge. How cool is that?!