Jessup's lead faculty in mathematics, Michelle Clark, joins the show to discuss how math helps us understand the wonder and beauty of God.

TRANSCRIPT

0:00

Hey everyone. Welcome to Jessup think I'm your host Mark Moore

0:03

and your co host Rex gurney.

0:05

Rex, today, we get to have one of our math professors on the show. She's the lead faculty and associate professor of mathematics, Michelle Clark, with our School of Natural and Applied Sciences, we're excited to have her on the show, because he's gonna be one teach us math, and really show us interesting ways that they are integrating faith into the math courses here at Jezza.

0:28

And we always love just introducing our listeners to the stellar faculty.

0:33

Yeah, so we hope you enjoy the show. And we know that you will learn something about math and about.

0:46

Well, Michelle, thank you so much for being on the show. Rex and I are excited, because we're not very good at math.

0:52

And we rarely have like STEM faculty on the show, you know, and yeah, that's a huge part of the educational experience at the school. So it's important to, to talk to some of them and to see what they have to teach us and share with us.

1:07

Exactly. So we'd love for you to kind of share with our listeners what you do here at Jessup. What, what all subjects, you know, kind of been introduced his math professor, and what does all that entail?

1:18

Yeah, thanks for having me on, guys. It's joy and an honor to be here with you guys today. Yeah, so I am Michelle Clark. I work here at Jessup. I've been here for about 10 years. So I started in 2012. Part time then, and then I came on full time in 2015.

1:38

I think we've all done that. Right. I think yeah.

1:41

Like part time, yeah, that's kind of the path in higher education. Places. Yeah. And before that, I actually taught to Junior High in high schools at Christian schools, too. So really, my whole kind of professional experience has been in Christian education. I've always taught mathematics at every single level, Junior High High School, I also taught at community college for a while to all different levels of math, ranging from the very lowest math where we're adding, subtracting, multiplying dividing numbers. I've taught Calculus I hear I also teach classes, like for math majors, you know, senior level, yeah, you know, elective type courses as well. So I really run the whole range of everything. I also teach like our math for liberal studies. So our students are trying to be multiple subject teachers. So I really teach the whole the whole range here. I'm also lead faculty right now for mathematics as well. So I'm involved in lots of other administration type things of running the department and having all these classes and stuff. So.

2:50

So Michelle, what would you say to someone like me, who is sort of math, math phobic, and I went to a private high school where you had to have math and science every single day, every single year. And in my junior year, I was taking trig in functions. And so the next place to go was calculus, but I was terrified of calculus. So somehow, I don't know how I did it, I convinced the administration to take advantage again. And so in my first year of college, because I thought, you know, I've got to have a math course for general education. So I took the Trigon functions course again, so three years in a row, I did so should have. I have been like terrified of calculus as I was to take that darn course three times in a row.

3:34

Yeah. And I always tell people, people get really scared of calculus. That sounds really intimidating. But actually, you did, you know, trig and functions of kind of like algebra three, right? If you think of like our old course of like algebra one, Algebra Two, and then usually take like a trigonometry class. That's really algebra three. And so when you start in calculus, it's calculus one, right, like y