A couple of days ago a former student came to me and told me that she referenced me in her college entrance essay, and asked if I'd like to read it. That ball can bounce in any direction, there's no telling what she wrote, but I told her sure, please email it to me. I received and read it this morning.
She wrote about how some traumatic event in middle school caused her to have tremendous, almost debilitating, anxiety. She wrote about how she broke down crying the first week of school during both her freshman and sophomore years, not because of any test but just because of general anxiety. But her sophomore year pre-calculus teacher "didn't believe in anxiety", and told her that if he were to give her a test on the alphabet she wouldn't be anxious at all because she knew the alphabet cold. Her anxiety was caused by not being confident that she knew the material being tested. The solution, then, was to know the material so well that there could be no fear of failure--and he was available to help her do that. That teacher, she said, was the first person to tell her that her anxiety was conquerable, that it wasn't something she had to live with, surrender to, or accommodate.
You can imagine where the story goes from there, but there's more. She grew to recognize that she could learn from mistakes and not just fear them. And I believe she's sincere in that belief, not just writing it to get into a university. I've seen a tremendous change in her confidence--and happiness--over the last couple years. She's grown a lot.
The second minor anecdote requires some background knowledge. When conducting hypothesis tests in statistics, one calculates what's known as a p-value. If the p-value is small, if it's unlikely you'd get the results you did given some initial hypothesis, then you reject your initial (null) hypothesis. The null hypothesis is abbreviated H-sub-0, or H-naught. When you see it written, it looks like "Ho".
The first year I taught statistics, a former student of mine--who has since become a math teacher!--told me a pithy rhyme that his stats professor in college used to help students remember how the p-value and null hypothesis interact.
I received a text message from another former student today:
Thank god i was in your class because my business stats professor just used a complicated way to explain "if p is low, reject the ho".Sometimes they listen. Sometimes they remember. Sometimes they learn.
2 comments:
Sometimes they listen. Sometimes they remember. Sometimes they learn....probably much more than you will ever realize.
It's always heartening to hear from students who actually learned something. When I expressed my dismay over teaching last year and two students who have since become friends on Facebook told me that my class was the most interesting and entertaining class they had taken that year. One girl is a young mother working as a part time graphic designer the other is finishing up her residency in surgery in Detroit. I save cards and emails for days I'm feeling low. It helps...a little. But it still doesn't help that now since my husband has been laid off again (damn you communications industry!) I will be stuck teaching until 65 or until I die, whichever comes first.
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