There have been many occasions that my teachers or elders helped me overcome academic and personal problems. There was one occasion where I had a major mental block concerning trigonometry topics. This block kept me from progressing through some work for a week or so until my pre-calc/trig teacher started helping me.
When I realized I needed help, I went to my teacher and he offered to help. For a week, he came in to school a half hour early to work with me on the problem. We worked together all week on this one topic concerning trig functions. I was frustrated during the entire experience because, in the past, math topics have always come easy to me. But he supported me throughout the whole week and didn’t get frustrated or angry with me. My guess is that he loved teaching and math so much that he enjoyed coming in early and helping me with trig at 6:45 every morning.
The whole problem was identified as me simply not learning a small fact correctly and resulted in all my work being off slightly. He helped me identify this about halfway through the week and then spent the rest of the week reteaching me trig functions. Before I had gone to him for help I had spent some time thinking and trying to find the problem myself but the whole time I was thinking about larger chunks of my brain while the problem was just sitting there, not standing out at all.
I am still thankful that I got to take that class from him because I know he gave me the best help that any math teacher at my school could have given me. I still remember that specific incident because the semester after that I had another problem with calculus while learning from another teacher who happened to be my pre-calc teacher’s father. They both made my math experiences enjoyable because they were both helpful and never gave up while helping me through my difficulties in various calc/trig topics.
