Student Profiles
Cody Ann Baker
Cody Baker remembers a tight circuit of frustration in high school math: she didn’t understand, so her teacher thought she was stupid; then she thought she was stupid, and the teacher treated her like she was stupid. The next time she tried math was at Columbia. She was 27, a single parent, and determined to get skills for work that would pay better than her job as a tour guide at Moaning Cavern. She briefly tried Math 101, then quickly dropped to a basic skills class. Three years later she is a math tutor and taking pre-calculus for fun.
She tells her students, “If you understand everything, you’re in the wrong class. It’s ok to be confused.”
Faculty advisors everywhere have seen what holes students get into when they step around basic math and English and rush for more “meaty” classes. Cody talks about that a lot with students. “I tell them don’t put off the math and English requirements. You may think math is irrelevant, but the reasoning, the thinking you learn there, you’ll be able to use in every subject.”
Cody plans to take those skills and transfer to a college where she can earn a bachelor’s degree. She’s considering a double major in English – and math.
Johnny Proctor
Johnny Proctor completed algebra in high school, and he says he did reasonably well. But by the time he got to community college at age 26 he was starting from scratch. “I had nothing to draw from, it was like trying to speak Urdu,” he said.
Johnny had spent his 20s working as a motorcycle mechanic, traveling, and getting a pilot’s license. To go further, he knew he needed to go to college. And once he was there, he quickly understood he would be more successful by using all the academic resources Columbia offered its students.
“I used the resources exhaustively,” he said of math labs and tutoring centers. “I’ve spent so much time there they should just give me cot to sleep on.”
Johnny is a tutor himself now. “I tell the students I work with that you don’t have to have a genetic predisposition to understand math. Look at me – if I learned it, they can, too,” he said.
Johnny plans to transfer to a four-year college next year. He is considering two career plans: construction management, which he thinks would get him into a good job soon; or economics, which may be a stepping-off-point to law school.
