When I was riding in the van with my mom, crying because I just didn’t understand my math homework and she couldn’t help me, I thought math just wasn’t for me. I wanted to call it quits in 8th grade algebra. Embarrassed, I asked to take a step back into pre-algebra so that I didn’t feel so out of my depth, and that helped. I continued on a typical course through high school as far as math was concerned and did fine. Not great, but fine. I even started to help some fellow students who were really stuck, because most of the time I was only kinda stuck.

After high school, I didn’t even think college was for me. None of my family really did college, and I thought that was just the way for us. But my dad came to me one day and encouraged me to consider it, and he offered to pay for my books. So I signed up for some classes at a local community college and declared myself a chemistry major.

As part of my first chemistry class, I had to use logarithms, and I was mentally back in the van, but this time managing to just cry on the inside. I couldn’t remember what logarithms were, and the chemistry teacher didn’t seem to have much interest in helping jog my memory.

For my math portion that semester, I suppose my high school education could have qualified me for calculus, but I was scared, so I signed up for something a little lighter so as not to get overwhelmed. It was the right move for me. I got to help another classmate and loved the feeling of helping alleviate her anxiety.

The next semester I went for it and signed up for calculus. On the first day, the professor asked the class what seemed like the most mind-blowing question with seemingly no answer: how can we know the slope of a line at a single point? She walked us through the solution that Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz came up with in the 1660s, and I was hooked. I felt like an instant member of a timeless fellowship of minds who seek out answers to unanswerable questions.

I loved math from then on. It was often a challenge. I spent a lot of time in our college’s math tutoring center; they had the solutions manual with ALL the answers (not just the odd ones). I signed up for the second semester of calculus, which was even more difficult and more satisfying to take on. I got more help and spent more time in the tutoring center; I even got a job there.

Fast forward to moving to Missoula in 2005, getting married, going back to school at U of M, and getting a math degree and teaching certificate. I have taught math in public school, private school, to my own children, and pretty much anyone who is too polite not to stop me. I even got a tattoo of my favorite proof.