The Road to Becoming a Math Teacher

I have loved math ever since I can remember. As a little kid I was always much more attentive in math class than any of my other classes. My idea of reading the newspaper was by skipping over the articles in the sports section and reading the statistics page. I would memorize the standings of whichever sports were in season and all the box scores from the previous night. If it were baseball season then I would know everybody’s batting average on the Phillies. I was just obsessed with numbers and could not get enough.

As I got older I started to think about what I could do with my love for math. I thought of many different careers such as an actuary, statistician, or engineer but teaching never even crossed my mind. At the end of my junior year of high school I started to visit colleges and I had decided that I wanted to study engineering. I chose engineering because I knew it involved a lot of math and I had two older brothers who had gone to college for engineering. In my senior year of high school I decided to attend Alfred University, a small college in upstate New York.

When I went to Alfred I really thought that I would go there for four years and be an engineer for the rest of my life. But as my freshmen year went on I started to think differently. I was not as interested in the applied mathematics, which was what I was learning as an engineer, as I was in just pure mathematics. I went and saw my advisor and found out that I could become a math major. I also had a change of heart about attending Alfred, so the next year I transferred to Rutgers University in New Brunswick. I became a math major there and I really enjoyed my classes.

I was asked from many different people what I was going to do with my degree after college. I really never knew how to answer these questions because I was just excited to be studying something that I liked. In the fall semester of my second year at Rutgers I saw a work-study position open that would involve working in an elementary school. I am going to be honest when I say that the reason that I applied was because this specific position paid more money than any of the other work-study jobs. I got the job and I began working at Clinton Elementary School in Plainfield two days a week. I was assigned to a third grade teacher and I would help her out during class. This is where I realized that this is what I wanted to do after college ended. I loved working with the kids and I really loved explaining math. I do not remember why but this program was not offered the next semester, so I was back working in a library for the rest of college.

The summer before my senior year I got a job as a driver at a warehouse in Piscataway. I took the job thinking that it was just to make some extra cash over the summer. It turned out that I worked at this place during my senior year and after I graduated I was an assistant manager there. I was making good money and was steadily moving up in the company and I started to think that this was going to be my career. But it did not last long because suddenly I was working all the time and it was not as enjoyable as it once was. I remember one night thinking about what I should do as the stress was building with this job. I remembered that a couple of years back how much I enjoyed working in a school. Soon after I gave my two-week notice and decided to try a career in education.

I started by finding a job at a learning center in Edison and there I tutored math for a couple of years. Since then I have found a job at Rutgers working in a program called ODASIS where I teach and mentor students in Calculus and Pre-calculus. I am in the Prudential Scholar program here at Montclair and I am also in the MAT program for secondary mathematics. I have also taught a Saturday SAT program at Rutgers for New Brunswick High School students. I have enjoyed all the teaching and tutoring that I have done so far and look forward to graduating in May and starting to teach in a high school next fall.