Erich Jauch understands that math trauma is real.

“It is socially acceptable to say you are bad at math and nobody bats an eye,” he said.

Not that he is asking everyone to love math, but Jauch has managed to turn some math-averse students around by showing them they can succeed in mastering its concepts.

Jauch, a 2012 Illinois Valley Community College graduate, enjoyed math and loved being a student math tutor on campus. “For most people, math is a computational-heavy subject. But once I got past sophomore year and the calculus sequence, I realized math is not just all about numbers.”

Jauch holds a doctorate in math and chairs the math department at Westminster College in Missouri, where he helps develop innovative approaches for teaching and learning math which are making a difference. Students’ math grades have improved, they report feeling better prepared, and fewer of them abandon the subject in frustration.

As the college’s math pathways coordinator, Jauch gets to know students at every ability level and says all their breakthroughs are worth celebrating. “Seeing students understand a piece of math for the first time and to completely change their perspective of their ability to do mathematics is always a rewarding experience!”

Elective classes where students receive additional instruction, and the opportunity and encouragement to repeat math tasks they struggle with, are proving effective techniques and the math tutoring/study lab that Jauch oversees is popular.

“The biggest success is getting them to do their homework. And they spend time with me in a lab where they can ask me right away if they get stuck on a problem.”

Jauch’s efforts to demystify math education are getting noticed. He was recently awarded Junior Faculty of the Year in the Natural Sciences and Mathematics Division at Westminster College.

Yet, he never envisioned teaching. A career in medicine beckoned and he was passionate about theater and music, too. But IVCC math professors Wes and Mary Black fueled the mathematical spark and when Mary Black recommended he consider college-level instruction, something clicked.

While other fields race through technology breakthroughs, math is still taught much as it always has been, but that is starting to change. “Now we integrate how we think about a problem, not just how to get to the answer.  Math is important because it strengthens critical-thinking muscles and expands our ability to work through problems,” Jauch added.

“Math teaches us how to look at information that is presented to us. It touches so many other subjects and allows us to teach problem-solving and lets us go back and assess our problem-solving skills. Maybe we do not need to know some of the formulas we learned in high school, but it is still important to be exposed to math,” he said.

Knowing that math is built on centuries of collaboration and passed on to future generations fascinates Jauch and he is happy to contribute to that lineage.