By Hector Rosario

“I finished!” I said as I slammed my math test on the teacher’s desk, my face overflowing with joy for having finished first. What came next stunned me. The teacher, Mrs. B, said with disdain, “So what? I finished 15 minutes ago. You think you’re so smart, but you’re not. If you were, you would be in a special school for gifted students.”

I couldn’t understand how my older sister’s favorite teacher could be so cruel to me. After all, I was in third grade. Third grade! I didn’t even know there were specialized schools. All I knew was the local public school next to the housing project where my grandmother lived in Puerto Rico. But for over a year, I had to endure the ridicule of my peers as they retold the story during class or recess, or mocked me for “not being so smart.” One day, I was even shoved into an ant hill as my classmates yelled that I “wasn’t smart enough,” while being bitten by tons of those bedeviled little creatures.

Mrs. B’s take on my intelligence deeply hurt me, but at the same time–perhaps as much as my father’s beatings for earning a B on a test or striking out at a baseball game–it instilled in me a passion for both learning and improving myself against all odds. Perhaps I wasn’t a genius, but I knew that I could learn, and fast.

Unlike Mrs. B, who might have never realized how much trauma her words inflicted on her students, my father apologized repeatedly to me for his reprimands from the time I was about 15 until he died, two months before he would turn 50. (I was 25 and had just started my doctoral studies in mathematics at Dartmouth College at the time.) My father was a high school graduate who felt poorly about his own schooling and intelligence; he wanted me to be different. In my last conversation with him, confused, he asked me, “Why do you study so much?” I told him, “Because of you Dad. Because you wanted me to be smart.”

I wish Mrs. B’s outburst was the only mathematical horror story in my life, but there were more. There was the eighth-grade teacher who gave me an F for “behavior” and another F for “class participation” so that she could lower my math course grade to a B. There was also the incident with a deeply-admired college professor who once told us, giggling, that we were not good math students; we were just “the least dirty socks in the laundry.”

I moved to NYC after my bachelor’s degree to become a high school teacher. Somehow, I heard about Teachers College, Columbia University, and I went to talk to someone there. Bruce Vogeli, a pre-eminent scholar of math education who would later become my doctoral advisor, welcomed me and talked to me at length. I will be forever grateful to him because, when no one else seemed to trust me, he believed in me. Many years later, when I introduced him with similar words to a large audience at a conference in Puerto Rico, he told me that my description was inaccurate. He clarified that the problem was not that nobody else trusted me, but that I had stopped trusting myself.

After finishing a master’s degree in mathematics education, Vogeli suggested I attend Dartmouth College’s doctoral program in mathematics. Though I only stayed at Dartmouth for two years before returning to Columbia to finish my doctorate in mathematics education, meeting Ken Bogart there had a major impact in my life. I was a divorced young father with sole custody of my first child, a four-year-old girl at the time. After a few months in the program, Bogart and his wife invited me over to his house for dinner. They baked the most delicious margherita pizza I had ever tasted. During dinner, he gave me wise parenting advice and also taught me a great lesson on learning mathematics. He said, “Hector, your problem is that you haven’t played enough with mathematics. You need to get your hands dirty and do the nitty-gritty details. You need to play.” To this day, I always encourage my students to “play with mathematics” and “get their hands dirty.” It’s the best way to learn mathematics.

This idea of playing with mathematics helps me to create a relaxed and welcoming classroom environment. As a teacher, I strive to be an uplifter to all my students, whether they were my students at Ivy League or other universities, state prisons, public schools, or math circles. Among my former students, I count a MacArthur Fellow and Rhodes Scholar, a winner of the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, and two World Science Scholars. I don’t claim any credit for their successes but feel joyous to have played a small part in their education.

Their immense successes, however, do make me think of a question Vogeli once posed during a public lecture while looking at me. He asked, “Who is going to be the next László Rátz?” in reference to the famed teacher of John von Neumann, Eugene Wigner, and other intellectual giants.

I don’t know who the next László Rátz will be, or if there is even a need for a second one. What matters to me is to help my students pursue excellence as they explore their human potential. Indeed, as I reflect upon my journey to become a teacher, it’s clear that I’m no longer that child who wanted to be better than his peers. I’m happy to inspire and support students the way Vogeli and Bogart did.

Let that be my tribute to them and to all the teachers in my life.

Dr. Hector Rosario has worked in diverse K–12 settings, at three prisons in North Carolina, and as a tenured full professor at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. In addition to his current position as Courtesy Professor with the Department of Mathematics at the University of Florida, Hector founded CYFEMAT—the International Network of Math Circles and Festivals—in July 2021, applying his previous experience as Director of Outreach and Festivals for the Julia Robinson Mathematics Festival. Hector is also the author or editor of three works in the field of mathematics education: Mathematics and Its Teaching in the Southern Americas (2015, with Bruce Vogeli and Patrick Scott); Math Makes Sense! A Constructivist Approach to the Teaching and Learning of Mathematics (2016, with Ana Helvia Quintero); and Mathematical Outreach: Explorations in Social Justice Around the Globe (2019). He currently resides with his family and over fifty animals in Florida.