A Well-Traveled Educator

In high school, one of my math teachers was notorious for getting side-tracked into talking about the time he spent teaching in a school on a tiny island in the South Pacific. Sure, calculus is important - but it couldn't hold the attention of a room full of students the way descriptions of Vanuatu could. From how the locals brewed kava to how he and the other teachers caught a long list of local diseases, he could enthrall us. We learned plenty of math in that class, enough that the occasional diversion into our teachers adventures weren't a problem. But, given a choice, I'm sure that those stories have been of far more use to me over the years than calculus ever has been.

My classmates and I all had very set paths in front of us. There was high school, college, and then jobs. At best, we could hope for a semester spent abroad in an appropriate cultural exchange — perhaps a few months in Madrid to work on our Spanish skills or a visit to Venice to polish an art history degree. Before math class, I'm sure none of us had even heard of Vanuatu. Geography class hadn't covered it; the closest any of us had gotten was performing in the school's production of "South Pacific."

But, after a few stories, all of us wanted to have adventures of our own. While France still sounded lovely, we were suddenly aware that we could hop a plane to Thailand or head down to South America just as easily. It wouldn't stop us from following a path towards a career — our math teacher had a stable job, after all. If he could have grand adventures (and they didn't stop just because he took a job in the U.S.), so could his students. He wasn't any different than us: he looked like the stereotypical math teacher. A lot older, maybe even a little geeky — but all of that just made all of us more certain that we could have even bigger adventures.

That was the value of my high school education: the knowledge that I could travel anywhere I wanted, and even land a job when I got there. Since then, I've visited cities around the world. And all it took was a few stories of how my math teacher lived on an island in the South Pacific.