Kasie B. Talbot
I am from Utah and moved to this area when I was 18. I love the mountains and desert there as much as I love the ocean.
Immediately after moving here, I was fortunate to be hired in one of the most interesting jobs at Cabrillo College, tutoring in the Math Learning Center. Somehow they trusted that I knew what I was doing, even though I'd never tutored anyone except by helping my classmates.
I tutored there for about five years and learned a lot from more experienced tutors about tutoring and polished my way of explaining things. I've come across many different ways of teaching and methods of solving the classic types of problems. In the learning center, we had to be familiar with how each instructor taught various topics.
In high school I wanted to learn everything by myself, which was good because I had the right attitude, but now I can appreciate how much time can be saved by tutoring. Although I reworked all the problems I missed until I thought I understood them, I did make many false conclusions. Also, I now think it's generally best to spend no more than about 30 minutes stuck on a problem (or no more than an hour if it's a Calculus problem). If you're stuck for longer than that, it's a perfectly good idea to get help.
In twelfth grade, I was in AP Calculus AB, and for the first time I was really challenged. My teacher had a sense of humor that really made me laugh, but surprisingly, his jokes seemed to make most other students roll their eyes. (He was old, round, and wore thick glasses and pocket protectors.)
When he would remind everyone they could get help from him after school, I imagined there would be a line I'd have to wait in, but I was one of the only ones to take advantage it. That was the first time I was ever tutored, and saw what a difference it could make. Being able to ask my own questions, and working one-on-one, was at least ten times more effective for me. Even now, twelve years later, I can still remember how he explained things. With the perserverence I put towards math, I wonder how much faster I could have learned it if I'd always been tutored.
Throughout that Calculus class, I began to appreciate math as an art. I remember when my teacher was tutoring me on Newton's Method, and he said, "Isn't that beautiful?" It is beautiful because it has the same repeating pattern you might see in a flower, only it's in a mental landscape, and it represents a clear, refined thought that Newton himself arrived at while trying to solve a problem.
I view math as as a tool that works similar to a telescope, allowing the viewer to see magnitudes beyond the ordinary human ability to calculate. Using math to solve unsolved problems is a lot like exploring where no man has gone before aboard the Enterprise!