May’s community member of the month is David Knott for his enthusiastic math teaching.
There is a calm, magnetic quality to David Knott’s teaching, as if he operates at a different frequency than the rest of the world within the walls of room 357—it’s warmer, inviting, deeply attuned. It’s a reflection of Knott’s philosophy about mathematics, that it need not just a means to an end, but beautiful, intimate even.
“Math is one of these things that doesn’t reveal its beauty and its secrets until you’ve spent a lot of time with it,” Knott said. “It’s something that cannot be understood at a glance.”
Knott has the intellect and passion of someone you might expect to find in a lecture hall of an old, storied university, but the manner of one less interested in accruing publications and impressing colleagues than connecting with students. His path to the classroom wasn’t direct or glamorous; it was, as he puts it, “unconventional.” He worked full-time during his undergraduate years, including four years at Taco Bell—“I still have dreams that I work at Taco Bell,” he points out—taking shifts from 5 p.m. to 1 a.m. to make ends meet.
Still, Knott continued to rise. A PhD program awaited him, and he seemed on the fast-track to a career as a mathematician. Yet, the unforgiving realities of the profession had begun to set in.
“I was like, ‘I’m broke, man.’ And I’m still working all the time and going to school all the time, and I’m not going to have my PhD until I’m 29,” he said. “And working in academia is hard. It very much isn’t the case that once you get your degree, you’re handed this phenomenal job. No, once you get your PhD, you’re fighting another competition for tenured positions, and nothing’s guaranteed, and all the while you’re living paycheck to paycheck, despite working all the time.”
Teaching, though, wouldn’t be off the table. He recalled how much he enjoyed teaching undergraduates while pursuing his PhD, and figured that his prospects, including wages and job security, might be better were he to get a master’s degree in mathematics and begin teaching at the high school level.
“So I tried it, and pretty much right away, I knew it was the right move. I just loved it right away,” Knott said.
What keeps him invested, he said, is the opportunity to help students succeed in mathematics, especially those who don’t identify as “math people.” It’s a remarkable shift, considering that Knott himself didn’t enjoy math as a high schooler. In fact, he didn’t really enjoy school at all.
“It felt repressive to me,” he said. “I didn’t like being told what to do or where to go or how to spend my time. Math, at that time, only existed in the context of a classroom and a teacher that I felt was authoritarian and overbearing.”
Perhaps that’s why, now, Knott’s students don’t feel like they’re being taught, but rather invited. Knott cracks jokes during lessons (only when he’s “in a good mood,” which he concedes is most of the time). He wonders aloud. He makes funny noises when he writes on the board.
His students said he cares more than any teacher they’ve ever had. Not in a performative, gold-star way, but with the attentiveness and dedication of someone who believes, with wholehearted conviction, that they can solve any problem they’re given. It’s a trait that junior Katherine Dougan appreciates, and said that as a result, students aren’t “scared to make mistakes.”
“He takes the time to explain things, and he doesn’t make kids feel stupid about asking questions. He makes sure to go through the entire process [to solve a question] and although it can take a lot of class time, it’s helpful because it encourages a learning environment,” Dougan said.
Junior Ana Topalova, another student in Knott’s Precalculus Advanced course, recalled his assistance with a difficult warm-up problem.
“In my table group, we came up with an answer, and it was correct, but for some reason, we didn’t understand the logic. None of us could understand why, exactly, it was correct,” Topalova said. “So, after the class had finished with the warm up, he came over to our group and we worked on it for a couple of minutes to figure out exactly how we got that answer.”
It’s that attentiveness, that care, that makes Knott’s classes feel like more than just math. Students linger after the bell. He has the “it” factor, a coolness that resonates with students—his penchant for video games and SoundCloud catalog certainly can’t hurt.
And his lessons aren’t confined to formulas; rather, he makes an effort to connect his content, from trigonometry to derivatives, to the real world.
Because in Knott’s class, nothing is ever just about the math. It’s about the feeling you get when a concept finally clicks. It’s about walking out of the room more curious than when you walked in.
And, he would hope, a little more in love with numbers, too.
