| Reaching past the panic
Photo by Jeff Watts |
Behzad Jalali, CAS ’81, ’86, ’04, was on the first page of a 600-page economics textbook at Leeds University in London in 1971 when panic struck. He’d grown up in Iran speaking Farsi, had just entered England to go to college, and only understood 10 percent of the words on the page. “Oh my god,” he recalls. “I was so scared.” He found refuge in an unlikely place for most students—math. “An equation’s an equation in any language,” says the director of AU’s mathematics and statistics education services. “‘X’ and ‘y’ are used all over the world. So it was the same thing in Farsi back in Iran. I thought, ‘OK, I could do this.’” And so he did. After switching his major and then transferring to AU to earn his BS, MA, and PhD in mathematics, Jalali now helps students who feel that same sense of panic when they crack open a math textbook. He manages the Department of Mathematics and Statistics’ tutoring lab, which is staffed by graduate and undergraduate students. The lab, he explains, attracts mainly nonmath students struggling with finite math, AU’s core math requirement, or basic statistics, a requirement for many nonmath majors. “Mathematics can be a fearsome subject,” he admits, “especially here where many students are liberal arts majors.” Before joining AU as a staff member in 2001, Jalali worked both as a restauranteur and a teacher. He opened a Persian restaurant in Georgetown shortly after graduating from AU in the mid-1980s. But the work didn’t suit him. “In a restaurant you are the manufacturer and the retailer at the same time,” he says. “That makes it extremely difficult, very hectic. You have the dining room and the kitchen. They’re two different worlds, but you have to connect them. That was a little too much for me.” He found refuge again in math, selling the restaurant in 1986 to teach at local elementary and middle schools as he pursued a graduate degree. As much as he was learning in the classrooms at AU, one of Jalali’s most important lessons came on the other side of the desk at Alice Deal Junior High School. “I used to think if I was reaching the majority of the students, I was doing my job, but I realized that wasn’t true,” he explains, noting that the realization still colors his approach to teaching as a math department adjunct. Though most of his algebra students at Alice Deal easily grasped the concepts, there was a minority in the back of the seventh grade classroom who just weren’t getting it. Jalali’s solution—eat faster. “I told my students they could come to the library during lunch for extra help,” he explains. “Because I could eat my lunch in seven or eight minutes. It doesn’t take very long to eat a sandwich. Then I could work with the students. And they came . . . They saw that I was willing to give up my free time, so they were willing to give up theirs.” Though Jalali is quick to deflect the credit, the extra sessions paid off. One year, in fact, 100 percent of his students passed the District’s algebra competency exam. Today, he may not be lunching with middle schoolers anymore, but in both his own classroom and his work with the tutoring lab, he still embraces that inclusive philosophy that drove him to speed-eat his sandwiches. “Anyone can reach the majority of students,” he says. “If you want to really teach. We need to find ways to reach them all.” —MG |
