Email From a Former Student I’d Never Met

By Keith Devlin @profkeithdevlin

For those of us who teach a subject so many find hard and frustrating (because it is), praise for our efforts from students comes relatively infrequently, so when it does it makes our day. I got this email from a former student of my online course on Coursera recently.

Hi Keith, I just wanted to thank you for the role you played in inspiring me on my mathematical journey.  About 7/8 years ago I took your course on Coursera "Introduction to mathematical thinking".  It was the first time (I was 25 years old) that I had seen Maths presented in such an interesting and engaging way.  I completed a few weeks of the course and really enjoyed it, but got stuck when there were questions involving rearranging powers.  I started revising high school maths and later, chose a maths module for the first year of a degree course.  The more I did, the more I enjoyed it, and having now completed my degree, I am training to be a maths teacher!
Your course, and the way you delivered it, have stuck with me and played a big role in influencing my views of how maths can be taught and enjoyed.
Thanks again! Luke

From the use of the plural “maths” I suspect Luke is in the UK, Canada, or Australia, but I really don’t know. Since he took the course several years ago, it could have been one of the sessions where I actively took part in the online discussions, and we may have interacted in person, but with the “class sizes” so big back then (the “M” in “MOOC” was for real), there was little opportunity to get to know any one student to any degree. But I have received similar emails from students in more recent sessions, when all they have of me are the lecture videos, so I know that for some students, that one-way, mediated-human-connection is enough to create the spark for learning.

Regardless of the degree and nature of the interaction between student and teacher, any credit for educational success has to be shared by both. In particular, a student has to be “ready” to learn. In Luke’s case, I see it as highly significant for his success that he had completed his school education some years before he took my course.

I was thinking about this on a three-hour bike ride I took with a fellow mathematics educator a few days ago, a professor at Sonoma State University who takes an active leadership role in K-12 curriculum development. Our discussion of the issues he has been grappling with reminded me of a Devlin’s Angle post I wrote back in 2016, in which I reflected on what it seems to take for real learning to take place. I titled that post “You can find the secret to doing mathematics in a tubeless bicycle tire.” If you didn’t catch the post back then, I’ll leave you to follow the link. I’ll just say this. Despite the whimsical title, I was deadly serious. Devlin’s Angle is not The Onion.