Hello everyone! It’s Mike, your friendly, neighborhood math professor. I wanted to share with you a little about myself and also some of my teaching philosophies.  When I’m not at work or at home prepping for the next day, I keep busy playing with my furry kids, practicing Italian, or playing some video games. I like to also dabble in cooking, mainly Italian inspired recipes, to share with (sometimes unsuspecting) friends and family.

The dogs let me dress them up for Halloween. In this photo, they were bees and I was the beekeeper.

Growing up, like everyone does, I kept changing my mind on what I wanted to do later in life.  For a time, I wanted to be a cartoonist, but I knew early on that there wasn’t a career in that.  When I was in the second grade, I knew I wanted to teach.  It wasn’t until eighth grade that I knew I wanted to teach math.  I happen to have a fantastic math teacher who showed me that I could combine drawing and math and make a career out of it.  When I started to attend Lakeland Community College, I learned that he community college level was perfect for me.  It allowed me to teach math, draw silly pictures, but most importantly, be in contact with a diverse group of people on a daily basis (fun for me as I also enjoy learning how people “tick”.)

There is no teacher, who can teach anything new.
He can just help us to remember, the things we always knew. Unknown

Mathematics, to me, is a natural process stemmed from the desire to try to understand our universe. Math is, and should be treated as, a language. Every language has rules, some of which were lost in time. And just like every language, it must be practiced daily to reduce the chance of it being forgotten. It is hard to accept as this level that sometimes math is done for the sake of math, that is, we do it because we can. However, when these times arise, remember that there is so much we do not still know about our universe and there may come a time where a method that was used or an idea that was learned that seemed unnecessary suddenly solves a very complex problem.

Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and diligence. Abigal Adams

Learning is a lifelong process, something everyone should actively do daily. Any type of learning helps a person to grow, whether it is learning a new song, using a new word, or refreshing things that were known a long time ago. However, when you start something new, one thing to keep in mind that failure is also part of learning. Mistakes are only made when a person did not learn from their previous failures. Do not ever treat failure as something negative, but instead as a way to grow.