Dear J.M.,
I remember the first day I arrived in your class. You alphabetized the columns of children and called role before handing out our first statistic assignment. One year has passed, and I no longer remember the details of this assignment; what I do remember is that this assignment was not about the statistics or the math behind statistics, but instead the application of mathematical principles such as statistics in all fields. What other teachers, especially math teachers, so often failed to address after the course of a year, you addressed day one, and then over and over again every single day.
You handed us our text books and a syllabus with all of our problems for the year, and the dates that each and every assignment was due. Prior to your class, I had never seen a syllabus so well planned out; thankfully, this prepared me for college.
My first math class had a syllabus composed exactly like yours, and I cannot thank you enough for teaching me to both keep track of and utilize my syllabus throughout the year instead of simply writing the assignments on the board (although, at the end of the year, you did this, and it helped so much because I was a dumb high schooler who often lost her things).
Your tests were so hard. I truthfully think I failed all but two of them, excluding the final and the AP exam. You refused to curve our tests, despite many complaints from us begging you to do so so our GPA wasn’t damaged. I remember hearing students considering to their friends if they should drop your class because of the difficulty of the exams that so often left our grades in limbo. I often questioned if I was capable of passing with a C.
As the chapter five exam approached, I realized I was not sure of conditional probability whatsoever, which was what we were being tested on. What started as a one-time session evolved into a weekly study session with a friend where we talked for hours about any and all problems we struggled with until we (I, because he was more or less my tutor) understood all of the material, or until it was late and we had other homework that still needed to be completed.
Your class taught me a love of struggling. Instead of cowering away from difficulty, I learned to embrace struggling to understand the complexities of problems, working my way through them over and over to find the right solution instead of simply working to understand what was expected. I wanted to learn why it worked.
Because of your devotion to our class, despite the bug funerals, the music, the bare footed genius, the roaring conversation, the distractions (like your story of the deer jumping through your window), the political debates, and the hatred of math of your students, you have helped me see my passion for mathematics, leading me to where I am today: an applied mathematics major.
Thank you,
Your (Favorite) Student
