Justice I. Odiase
Assistant Professor, Mathematics

A good student-teacher rapport is good for learning, students tend to learn better when they find it easy to relate with their teacher.  It is this philosophy of mine that impacted the student, Bob, that I wish to discuss in this essay.  I had the opportunity of teaching Bob a few years ago, it was an introductory statistics class.  From the onset, I realized that Bob easily understands concepts and was well ahead of the pace of the class.  I adopted a group teaching strategy to make him useful in discussing concepts with his colleagues so as to avoid boredom.

In one of my class sessions, he suddenly mentioned that he read one of my journal publications online and found it fascinating, he wanted a brief discussion of the paper.  I spent a few minutes highlighting the general idea of the paper.  The whole class lit up and Bob was genuinely happy, realizing that the statistical concepts he was learning in class actually had real-life applications.  He asked several career questions throughout the semester.

Bob turned out to be one of the best students in the class.  In the following semester, I ran into him on campus in the hallway and he said he was seriously considering studying statistics as a career.  I encouraged him and asked him to keep in touch.

The following academic year, I learnt that he gained admission into one of the Ivy League universities and I was excited and happy for him.  In his first semester in the university, I received an email from him confirming the admission and an update on what he had been up to: 

“… I wish to say thank you for getting me interested in statistics. I am using the skills and interests you helped me build in statistics to develop a new approach to language modeling in natural language processing. Hopefully my work will go onto create a universal model of language or answer big problems in linguistics.”

This statement validates our work as teachers and reaffirms the fact that our students look up to us as mirrors and ambassadors of the courses we teach.  A little extra time spent interacting with them is a worthwhile investment in their future.