"I’m Ricardo C, a tenured math faculty at Bellevue College (Seattle area). Before becoming a ranked professor, I started off as a part-time math tutor at the Math Learning Center at New Mexico State University in 2008. At the time I had no prior math tutoring experience and I was also an integral calculus student. Despite my lack of experience and limited math knowledge, I was eager to learn how to teach people and learn more math in the process, and I grew to be one of the most lauded and sought out tutors during my years working at the MLC (2008-2013); I received much recognition and earned the Outstanding Tutor Award.

I knew I wanted to teach math professionally around 2008 after hearing many of the students I tutored tell me that they wished I was their math teacher. I pursued my master’s degree in general mathematics in 2011 after graduating with my bachelor’s degree in mathematics. While in graduate school, I taught Intermediate Algebra and Calculus. To help me gain more teaching experience, I took on a part-time faculty position at El Paso Community College, where I taught Beginning Algebra on Saturdays (Jan2012-May2013). By March of 2013, two months before finishing my master’s degree, I was offered a tenure-track position by Bellevue College, and began my professional teaching career in September 2013.

I never took a course on how to be a math teacher before becoming a math professor. My teaching skills were developed through hundreds of hours of the one-on-one tutoring I did while in college, the few courses I taught while in college, and the talented professors I learned from when I was a student. What separates me from other math teachers is that I was once the struggling math student--the student that wasn't innately endowed with math skills. I worked hard trying to learn math and had to develop perspective that helped me understand math well. I know how to talk to students in simple terms when I teach complicated ideas." less...