Since my earliest teaching days, I have taught students of different racial, religious, and socioeconomic backgrounds.  Baptist Hill Middle High School was over 90% black, as well as being a low income rural area.  I did my best to make connections with them where I could, occasionally discussing their favorite music and TV shows.  I talked to one student about the cast of his favorite cartoon and checked out a comic book from the library for him.  Another student was on the football team, and I asked him to explain a play he did that I did not understand.  I hope those moments of connection made them more open to learning from me.  One mistake I made was when I tried to connect “double negatives” in language to multiplication of negative numbers.  I missed the fact that, for them, double negatives are a normal part of language.  When a student speaking African American Vernacular English says “I ain’t going nowhere,” “ain’t” is an intensifier, not a negation.

     My time at community colleges exposed me to many “non-traditional” students.  I like to get to know students on the first day by asking them, in addition to practical questions like their majors, what is their hometown and what was their greatest challenge.  I have had students tell me they were homeless, they had family members murdered, they had heart attacks, and other heart-wrenching circumstances.  The phrase “students don’t care what you know until they know that you care” is a cliche that happens to be true.  I have an open door for help outside of class, but I try to remember that they don’t all have the luxury of extra time.

     Much of the difficulty in creating diversity in education is not about attraction but retention.  I am planning a research project on improving retention in my course, and background is one variable to look at.  I am guaranteed a diverse class, given that over half of UNM’s population is either Hispanic or American Indian (so it is officially classified as a Minority-Serving Institution).  Students who are from lower socioeconomic statuses or recent immigrants to the United States may be the first in their families to attend college.  Of course, one’s race does not guarantee anything, so I will need to collect specific biographical data.

     Last year, I had an interesting challenge with a cohort of eight students from Kuwait who form a closely knit circle.  Several of them were originally enrolled in another section and begged me to let them transfer.  I was told I would be within my rights to refuse, and yet I felt it was important that they be allowed to stick together.  They told me they were all new to the country and had to hurriedly register at the beginning of the semester.  For students in such a new environment, the presence of a familiar support system can be the difference between success and failure.  The fact that almost all of their last names begin with “Al” made it difficult to learn all their names.  I had to create some mnemonics to keep them straight (“Faisal” has the most “facial” hair, for instance).  Once I brought some candy to give out in class, and one of them asked if it contained gelatin, so I googled whether Tootsie Rolls are halal.  A particular challenge has been setting clear boundaries while also respecting their difficult situation.  For example, I let the ones who transferred turn in homework late because the due dates were unclear while they were transferring.  On the other hand, I have been strict about quizzes have a set time limit, since they do not have any documented accommodations.  I do not know if it is a cultural expectation to have extra time or just their individual personalities, but my standard is to be open to discussion but still be fair and consistent.

     Another type of diversity is that of disability.  I tend to have at least one or two students per semester who have accommodations that allow them extended time to take tests outside the class through the school’s Accessibility and Resource Center (ARC).  Last year, I had one student who did very well on homework but terribly on tests, and I encouraged her to look into accommodations.  She had never heard of the ADA and was worried that any accommodations would be held against her in future employment searches.  I informed her that such discrimination is illegal and that such records are confidential anyway.  She was very excited and immediately made contact, though it was too late in the semester for it to apply to my class.  In the future, I will draw attention to disability services on the opening day of class.

     There is a prevalent belief among the lay population that math is immutable and objective throughout the world, and therefore there is no need to take culture into account.  This is demonstrably untrue to anyone who has studied the history of mathematics.  While I believe that there are universal truths we discover through math, the form and style of the subject is intensely cultural.  Amir Alexander’s fascinating book Infinitesimal tells the story of how Leibniz’s version of Calculus was contested by competing religious authorities.  Algebra was invented in the Arab world, Geometry in Greece, and the two were combined by the French Descartes.  I make it a point to include the history and development of the subject in my lectures, and when possible I bring in contributions from the lesser-known sources.  Sometimes I will mention other number systems, like the Babylonian base-60 or the binary base-2.  I would like to take or audit a course on math history someday so as to strengthen my teaching abilities in the future.  I am always looking for ways to expand my pool of references in hopes of including more students.  At the same time, I try my best to listen to what they have to offer and see if there are ways I can make it easier on them.  Diversity and inclusion is, at its core, just another way of saying that we have to relate to one another.