It starts rather early. The favorite of Sharon Carter’s three cats wakes her up. “My husband is retired, so he makes breakfast every day. It’s the same thing: oatmeal and this coffee substitute that my grandfather used to drink called Postum. I then grab my lunch that I’ve made the night before, all my stuff, especially my computer, and drive 20 to 30 minutes to school.”
Carter, senior lecturer in the math and computer department, usually gets to campus at 7:30. “Nobody’s here, and I get my choice of parking spots!” she says.
“I usually get to class about 10 minutes early to visit with my students and to make sure that my computer works. One of my worst fears is to miss a class. Every day is so precious!”
Carter takes attendance and reviews what they covered the day before, usually with a warm-up problem, and asks for volunteers to come to the board to work it out “so I can see how they’re thinking about math,” she said.
“Sometimes the students get stuck. That’s when we learn. Getting stuck is a very important thing in mathematics. We need to sit with being stuck and go back to the process,” Carter explained.
Carter does “a lot more than just teach math. I teach the philosophy of math, the approach to mathematics. I try to build my students’ self-esteem and make them feel comfortable making mistakes. I still make my share of them.
“Why I think I’m such a good teacher is because I struggled with math myself. Math didn’t come easily to me. But I thought it was beautiful!” Carter joined LTU nine years ago and has been teaching mathematics for nearly 40 years. She teaches students that “the process is really the most important part of mathematics. I teach them how to classify problems. The brain is a file cabinet with folders in it. What techniques can students pull from their file cabinet to solve a problem that looks like this?”
Success in math is practice, practice, practice. “For my first test in college, I read the book without actively doing the problems. On the test, I froze because I had to do them actively not passively!” she recalled. Because it takes practice.
She gives her students a brief handout of concepts and terminology to memorize. But studying math comes from doing problems and analyzing what process to follow to the solution.
“I do like to have a relaxed class. I want students to shake their heads or look confused if they don’t get something so I can help them. I want them to love math as I do.” She has office hours when students can come for extra help.
After class, Carter grades papers. At night, she reviews her PowerPoint presentation for the next day. “Sometimes I watch videos of math professors at two times speed. I’m always trying to find a way to explain something a little better or to do my job a little better. I swim about two miles, and I lift weights every day after work.
“And guess what? My husband cooks dinner. I bring home the bacon, and he cooks it.”
