Arnie Cutler Recipient Letter
When I submitted the application for this scholarship, I had never once considered the fact that this math would be difficult for me. I am good at math. I love math. I received my acceptance letter with a warning that graduate level math programs that are completely online are difficult and I blew it off. It never crossed my mind that it would be hard for me. Boy, was I wrong.
This semester I learned more about myself and my students than I learned about math. Don’t get me wrong, I learned a TON about math. Math that I never even knew existed was introduced to me in a way that was both engaging and insightful. However, what I took away from the class and what I will be applying to my classroom has nothing to do with the amazing math that I learned about.
When it comes to math, I did more proofs than I knew were physically possible. Permutations, subsets and multisets became my best friends. I solved recurrence relations, extracted coefficients, and decoded codes. I loved the practical application of these different strategies but I really struggled with the abstract ideas.
At the beginning of the semester, I behaved very similarly to my students. I worked hard, I solved the questions to the best of my ability and I submitted my homework. Guess what, I failed. I have never failed anything in my life and I just failed my first homework of the semester in a class that I needed to pass both to continue pursuing my degree and to keep this scholarship. I was devastated. I cried a little, okay, a lot, and then I thought about what I would do as a teacher, so I made a plan. I emailed the professor and asked to fix the questions that I got completely wrong, decided to get a tutor and made a schedule of how to complete each assignment so that I was working on it every single day, rather than just the weekends that I had put in on the first email.
Not surprisingly, my professor did not let me redo the questions but he encouraged me to ask more questions, compared to the zero that I had asked for the first assignment even though I clearly had no idea what I was doing on some of the questions. He encouraged me to seek help from outside sources (as long as I cited them) and he reassured me that this is not unusual in a graduate level math course.
So I did just that. I asked question after question, possibly bordering on a level of annoyance but I never received an email that made me feel like I was annoying in return. My professor replied with either encouraging words or a video to help me through what I had mistaken and by the end of the semester I was averaging high C’s or low B’s.
The biggest takeaway I had from this course is knowing how it feels to not understand something right away, or at all in some cases. My students are introduced to completely new concepts almost daily and although some of them pick up on those skills right away, there are many that struggle. Although I have always empathized with those students, now I actually understand how they are feeling. I talked to my students about this course all the time. I explained how difficult it was for me and how hard I was working in hopes to get a C.
My favorite conversation that I had with a group of students had to do with flexible thinking, which is the Habit of Mind that I cover in my classroom. We discussed when flexible thinking is required and how this course has really had me thinking flexibly because at the beginning, I assumed I would get an A and had to think flexibly to come up with tools and strategies to use in order to hopefully achieve a C. One of my students looked at me like I was an idiot for hoping for a C and I was able to explain that a C is average, that a C was an accomplishment for me, that a C was literally all I was hoping and dreaming about in this course because it was so difficult for me. I’m hoping that he left class that day with a new understanding of what an accomplishment is, how hard some people have to work “JUST” to get a C, and that a C is nothing to be upset about.
My students were there when I checked my grades at the end of the semester and literally cheered for me when I told them that I got a C! They left class and excitedly told their peers that I got a C. It wasn’t just my accomplishment, it was theirs. Although this semester was difficult because of the level of math, it was also amazing because of the insight that I was able to get about my students and that I was able to give to some of my high flying students. I will never look back on this semester and wish it never happened, although I spent more hours than I’d care to admit at Starbucks working each weekend on it!
Thank you so much for the opportunity to take this course and learn about myself and the students in my classroom every day.
Sincerely,
Megan Amundson