Cranks My Tractor

Having taught college math courses for over 15 years now, I am comfortable in the classroom. To be honest, I love teaching math. With the internet, I’ve also been able to teach students all over the world right from my house. This is something that I truly have enjoyed. When I teach, I consider it to be an opportunity to meet new people and go to places “virtually” that I will never get to go.

Presently, I have a student in one of my traditional classes (in a real building) who is from Baghdad, Iraq. He is a member of the Armed Forces (ours) and is bright and a joy to be around. He speaks three languages fluently and obviously has to prove a little more each day that he is capable. He succeeds.

I have no desire to go to Iraq, however being able to teach someone who grew up there and can tell me about it is pretty amazing.

Recently, a university I teach for approached me with a proposal. It was one of those that I could not refuse, as a matter of fact, I felt like I had won the lottery. They asked me if I would be interested in tutoring/teaching a student in statistics one on one. I love statistics, I love probability, I was taught by my Daddy with a deck of cards.

Why this special treatment for this student?

Well, maybe it’s because students like to hear me. Every Sunday night I go live on the internet, close to 1000 students “hear me” either live on Sunday evening or the recorded version later in the week. Honestly, I think it’s because they want to hear what I sound like, how I put things and to be entertained. It never fails, a student will mistakenly leave their microphone on and I can hear them say with a laugh to their spouse or child, “You have to come hear this,” or “a real redneck rocket scientist.”

One student asked me once, “My whole family is here, do you mind if we all listen?”

I don’t mind.

I teach with one goal and it was taken from my favorite math professor in college used to tell me, “a good teacher makes the difficult seem simple, rather than the simple seem difficult.”

That is what he did, and also what I try do.

Oversimplifying things is good as far as my students are concerned.

My one on one student’s name is Greg, and he is blind. My job is to speak statistics and explain statistics such that Greg can master the body of knowledge for this particular class. I was and am continued to be honored by this task.

After my first conversation with Greg, I was both excited and curious. I realized immediately that Greg was very bright, eager and he seemed to “get me.” This was a relief. He didn’t make fun of the way I talked, and he even noted that he understood me (having relatives from Kentucky).

Talking to Greg on the phone about every other day for the first week of class brought new surprises and rewards. He is a single dad, who gained custody of his young son. Greg and his son live with Greg’s parents. Diapers? They weren’t a problem; Greg could change them in his sleep. His son is now out of diapers and living with a loving dad and grandparents.

There were certain questions that I was hesitant to ask, but Greg ended up being very candid about. He has been blind for almost ten years, having lost his sight due to diabetes. This allows me to approach some topics differently, knowing that Greg had twenty some odd years of sight. He is now 100% blind.

Talking to Greg, I was at first hesitant to use terms like “see” or “watch” or “look at.” Now, I know better. We talk about watching football games and seeing the graphs and tables of data. Greg sees things differently, but in my opinion has an advantage when it comes to “seeing statistics.”

When I say this, I mean that Greg has an extraordinary ability to visualize. We talk about things like data, graphs and the shapes of distributions and how they look (in our head). For example, the normal distribution is the “perfect mountain.”

After one week, I’ve found myself asking more of Greg than other students. I do this not because he is blind, but because he is capable and he is my student. I want him to be the best he can be. An example of this is a recent spreadsheet that I sent him that had a calculation error in it, I told him to find it and explain to me. He did and we talked about the spreadsheet “not seeing” all of the values.

This was an error that 9 out of 10 students usually completely overlook.

He wants to be involved with computer programming, thus he needs to be able to find errors like this and see them. He did.

This story will be continued for the next eight weeks on the Cranks My Tractor website at www.CranksMyTractor.com.