Response from Ken Gross to receiving the Haimo Award

(The Northeastern Section is proud to learn that Kenneth I. Gross, University of Vermont, is a winner of a Haimo Award this year. He will receive it at the Joint Meetings in San Diego this January. I asked him for his reaction and this is what he sent. –the editor.)

I am honored to be asked by the MAA-NES to share with the readers of the Newsletter my thoughts on receiving the Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo Award for Distinguished Teaching of Mathematics.

Notification of the award came in an e-mail message which I read while on lunch break from an intensive five day course I was presenting to elementary and middle school teachers in the Little Rock School District in Arkansas. As I walked back to class, I reflected upon the immense dedication of these teachers, their concern for the well-being of their students, the difficulty of their job, and that many of them deserve a teaching award they will probably never receive. It was simultaneously a joyful and humbling experience to be the recipient of such a prestigious national award.

Being an educator is a special profession, for it offers immortality. We are all eventually going to die, but in our profession we can live on in the hearts and minds of the students whose lives we have touched and enriched. We become a link in the chain of relationships from those who have been our mentors to those whom we have mentored and will become the mentors of others. I feel, therefore, a profound sense of gratitude to the many outstanding teachers who nurtured me in my own education and along my career path, and the many hundreds of wonderful students at all levels of the educational spectrum whose friendship I cherish and whose contributions to education, knowledge, and humanity I admire.

To be a parent is to be a teacher, and I was especially inspired by my mother, widowed during my childhood, from whom I acquired a strong work ethic and learned the importance of questioning conventional wisdom; by my older brother Herb, a surrogate father to me in my youth and a distinguished educator in his own right, from whom I absorbed by osmosis the critical role of strong human values in education and in interpersonal relationships in general; and by my Ph.D. advisor, research collaborator, and life-long friend Ray Kunze, without whom I would never have become a mathematician. I have been blessed many times over.

In closing I want to express heartfelt thanks to the national MAA, to the New England Section of the MAA for the Distinguished Teaching Award that qualified me for the national award, and to my colleagues in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Vermont for creating an atmosphere in which high quality teaching at all levels is a primary imperative.