Since we're nearing the end of the Back to School period (and by "end", I mean target has put all of their Back to School items on Clearance), I figured I'd post about school.
I'm extremely bad about timing- so much so that the topics in my posts will be retro chic by the time they're posted. But this is definitely a post that needed to go up, no matter how long it stayed in blog purgatory.
Not counting those in my family and my peers, I have a very small circle of people who I acknowledge and revere for being a positive influence on the person I am today. I do think that everyone I've come across has played a part, but I'm referring to the major players- Kaye Pedziwater, Robert Barker, Lou Pressman, Erin Kelly, and Erin Vail. Not surprisingly, all of these people were teachers of mine.
And then there’s Paul Sally.
I was a teenager in the early 2000s- you remember then, don’t you? Alicia Keys was a superstar in the making, MTV still showed music videos, and you couldn’t ask anyone a question without them following up with “Is that your final answer?”. Back then I was a proud participant in the Young Scholars Program- a mathematics workshop that select Chicagoland students attend to learn advanced mathematical concepts. It was academic, it was geeky, and I loved every minute of it.
Paul Sally was the director of the program. Dr. Sally was a respected mathematician, and had lost an eye and one leg to early diabetes. So you can imagine how, as a twelve year old, I relished at the idea that I'd be taught by a guy who I would refer to as "Professor Pirate"- never to his face though- he'd probably kill me.
Early on, it was clear how good a teacher that Dr. Sally was. His love for math and learning in general made him the perfect candidate to further inspire young, impressionable minds to go into mathematics. Our classes were always fairly mixed gender, and Dr. Sally had no preference-he was probably one of the first guys to unintentionally push STEM for girls.
He was a playful guy who could make a joke, but he expected you to listen, to speak up, and to try harder, no matter your skill level. He was always happy to go over homework problems to make sure that everyone grasped the concepts put forth, knowing that math is a subject which builds upon past ideas to understand new ones. Best of all, he had this big magnetic personality that made you excited about math and how much you could learn from him. Even to this day, I credit a good amount of my love for learning to him and how he really widened the boundaries of what I would consider a teacher- everyone after him would have an incredibly tough act to follow.
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