By Daisy Hassani & Roveiza Irfan
Gargoyle assistant editor & co-editor-in-chief
Posted Thursday, June 8, 2006, The OG, features

[Note: This story originally appeared in the March 17, 2006, issue of the print Gargoyle. We are posting it to mark the retirement of math teacher Elizabeth Jockusch. Click here for a tribute to Jockusch that we posted shortly after she announced her intention to retire.]

The classroom is nearly silent except for the sound of chalk scratching on the blackboard. The eyes of 20 students are running frantically back and forth from the board to their notebooks as they copy down a particularly complex calculus proof.

While some teachers utilize the technology that is available in the “smart rooms,” this classroom is much more traditional. One glance at the board with paragraphs of explanations written out in near-perfect handwriting shows that this teacher really wants her students to understand the material at hand.

With her planned retirement at the end of the current school year, math teacher Elizabeth Jockusch will bring an end to her long line of students who were more than prepared for advanced college courses. So how did it all start?

Getting on the math path
Jockusch didn't always plan on going into math. It was only during her junior year at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pa., after she decided that she would drop her Modern Physics course and pick up Complex Variables, that she changed her major from physics to math.

“I finally decided that I would rather do math than physics and, really, I changed one course, and that's what changed me from a physics major to a math major,” Jockusch says.

Jockusch grew up in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where her father, Paul Northrop, taught physics at Vassar College. Although she didn't always plan on pursuing math or science, she was exposed to the fields while growing up.

“There was always science,” Jockusch remembers. “Science was always being talked about. I could ask science questions and get interesting answers. [But] no one ever suggested I should be a scientist.”

The missing variable
Jockusch's interest in science was also spurred by the events of the day, particularly the U.S. desire to compete with the Soviets for advances in science and technology.

“Sputnik went up in my freshman year of high school [Oct. 4, 1957], and the whole nation began to worry that we were behind in science,” says Jockusch. “And by my sophomore year, the school was establishing honors programs.”

Jockusch attended a large public school in Lexington, Mass., where many of the courses, like at Uni, were academically demanding.

“I was with kids who were a lot like Uni High kids,” she recalls. “The main [way in which] Uni is different is in the social control. We had hall passes, dress codes; girls had to wear skirts or dresses, no slacks; boys could not wear jeans.”

Jockusch notices that one of the benefits of high school now, or at least at Uni, is that male and female students can do things together without being romantic friends.

She also had to learn how to deal with the obstacles barring women's progress in math and science fields. After her freshman introductory physics course in college, she was the only female student in her physics classes. This forced Jockusch to learn independently from her classmates.

“It got lonely, ” says Jockusch of her experience being a woman in a male-dominated field. “I didn't really have a study group to sit in the library and work problems with. I did a lot on my own, and I had met my future husband, my boyfriend, and he was my study group some of the time.”

Moving to the Midwest
After college, Jockusch pursued nonacademic interests.

“I got married a week later [after graduating from Swarthmore College],” she says. “It was a different time; I was not the first in my circle of friends to get married. There were some who married during college. I waited until afterward.”

Jockusch then taught for a year at an all-girls secondary school near Boston. It was there that she gained experience dealing with students.

“You learn how to run a classroom,” says Jockusch. “But a private girls secondary school with middle-school girls who had been taught to rise as the teacher entered and say ‘Good morning, Mrs. Jockusch' and stand when called on to recite were not out-of-control, wild kids.”

Jockusch attended graduate school at MIT for three years and then took some time off to raise her three children: William, Elizabeth, and Rebecca.

Nine years later, she and her family came to Urbana when her husband, Carl, joined the University of Illinois math department. She taught one fall semester at the U of I before she began teaching at Uni in 1976.

With her announced retirement, Jockusch will have taught at Uni for a total of 26 years. (She was on hiatus from Uni from 1980 to 1984.) So what has she seen change in Uni's atmosphere in her time at the school?

“I see students having time crises, in some ways more than they used to, because they used to truly have a fair number of extracurricular activities they could do or not do as necessity required,” says Jockusch.

In the classroom
Jockusch enjoys seeing students who value the material and are willing to devote their attention to learning it. Her classroom environment is based on her model of a teacher-centered classroom, where she leads the discussion and the students are responsible for paying attention and understanding the material through practice.

However, the classroom isn't always tense and quiet. Many students have mastered the art of lightening up the atmosphere without diverting from the topic at hand.

“I do think that students are often quite funny,” she says. “It's often just a quick bit of repartee. I don't mind that at all, as long as it doesn't detract from the lesson — and students usually fairly quickly learn what detracts and what doesn't.”

Teresa Sonka, who graduated in 2004 and is currently a sophomore at the U of I, recalled a time when her Calculus II class went outside and had a party.

“We baked a ‘pi,'” says Sonka. “How dorky of us.”

Sonka herself is evidence of the power of Jockusch's teaching.

“I never really liked math or knew any real math before taking Calc I, II, & III with Mrs. Jockusch,” she says. “Now my main interests are math and its applications. It's amazing that one teacher could do that much for me.”

David Smyth, who graduated in 1999 and is pursuing graduate work in math at MIT, shares the sentiment.

“Eight years after the fact, I still remember sitting on the couch of my living room trying (and failing) to figure out the area of grazing pasture available to a goat who's tethered to the side of a barn with a five-meter long rope and the barn has a semicircumference of five meters,” he recalls.

Adding it up
Jockusch's students and colleagues will surely miss her when she retires. Math department executive teacher Craig Russell recalls looking to Jockusch for advice on how to approach different student situations.

“I always benefit from those discussions because she has a lot of experience and valuable insight,” he says.

And while Russell believes that Jockusch's students see her as a “math goddess,” he notes that there is more to her than meets the eye.

“She really cares about the school … and is quite passionate that the school does the right thing at the right time,” he says.

The presence that Jockusch has established in the math department will be hard to replace, especially for the students who benefit from her rigorous teaching style, which they come to appreciate with time.

“I listen to complaints five years after graduation,” Jockusch says. “I've never had a complaint at that point.”