Hi Mr. Nelson,
I first want to thank you for being my math teacher back in high school. With your abilities, you definitely did not have to teach high school if you did not love it. You were a blessing in my life and I know you continue to be one in your students’ lives today.
I believe your class helped prepare me for college more than any of the other classes I took at Valley. There are tons of reasons why, but I will try and stick to the main ones.
To be effective in explaining why your teaching method affected me so much, it might be helpful to understand where I am now. I attended ASU Polytechnic for a degree in Mechanical Engineering Systems with a minor in Electrical Engineering Systems. I graduated within 4 years, Summa Cum Laude, with a final gpa of 3.93. During my senior year I was able to get a Manufacturing internship at British Aerospace Engineer Systems (BAE Systems) in Phoenix, while in school full time, which resulted in my current job. Today I am working at BAE as an Assistant Program Manager and work on various different programs varying from IED resistant seating for military vehicles to armor solutions for military helicopters.
The first reason why your class helped me as much as it did was you teaching the fundamentals, and teaching them well. For my degree I had to take Calc 1 through 3, Differential Equations, and other heavily calc based classes such as Thermodynamics and Thermo-fluids. My Thermo professor would fail half of his class regularly for students who did not know the fundamentals of calculus. His favorite quote was, “if you cannot take the derivative of something or integrate it, you CANNOT be an engineer,” (not very nice I know, but he was a genuinely nice guy if you asked for help outside of class in office hours; but I digress). I know for a fact that if you had not instilled a strong mathematical foundation in me, I would not have succeeded in many of my classes.
The other reason was the way you taught your class fell directly in line with how the majority of my classes were taught throughout college. You would teach a concept, or a basic problem, without the flash and flare and extras that can be seen in the same type of problems, and assign homework around that main concept with problems that would have those extra wrinkles in them. You would leave it up to us to figure out how to attack those wrinkles. This method is basically verbatim the method that I ran into all throughout college.
Throughout Thermodynamics there would be a main concept and the assignment would be that main concept wrapped in layers of wrinkles that were left up to us to figure out. You and that professor would never just show me how to do a problem, you would both make me struggle and figure out a step and then give me nudge so I could go back and figure out the next step. To sum it up, in my mind, you teach the only way there is to teach a tough subject; in a way that makes the student the master of the subject rather than just capable of performing the task.
However, the main reason why your class was so effective in preparing me for college and my following career was because all you ever asked of me was to struggle through the problems and to do my best. I feel, looking back now, that your class was more than just teaching calculus
but also about teaching character through not being “spoon fed”. In
life (very much like in math!) there are lots of problems that we face. Not every problem requires high levels of thinking, but every problem does require work. I know you knew that while teaching us, but at that time it all just seemed to me like math. You instilled, at a very malleable phase in my life, the drive to work hard mentally at everything I do.
Thank you for everything you’ve done and for the blessing that God has made you.
Please let me know if there is anything I can do for Valley.
Thank you again,
Sean Higgins
P.S.
As a side note if you do have any students now that are performing really well I highly recommend the engineering program out at ASU Poly. I really enjoyed the program, classes were roughly only ever 30 students, and there was a really good small school feel to the whole program.
P.P.S.
Hannah and I are getting married this spring so I thought it would be fun to include a success story of a high school relationship that has turned into a God centered marriage.