Interview with Mr. Tran
This school year, The Science Academy welcomed a new math teacher to its staff: Mr. Tran, who teaches Pre-Algebra for 6th grade, as well as AP Statistics and Discrete Math for 12th grade, in room N305. Journalism Club’s Maleeya Mickelson took the opportunity to ask him a few questions so we can get to know him better.
Where did you go to college and what did you major in?
I went to college at UCLA and I majored in Applied Math with a specialization in computation.
What teaching experience did you have prior to being here at The Science Academy?
My teaching experience prior to The Science Academy has mostly consisted of student teaching and training.
How have you been liking it so far at Science Academy? What’s been the best part?
To be honest, it’s been challenging. With teaching, there's more than just teaching the material. There's managing the students, keeping track of their grades, and so on and so forth. And that has been a bit of a harder process for me because sometimes that gets in the way of trying to create a lesson plan that I'm really happy with day to day. But other than that, there's been great aspects to it. I've met a lot of amazing students. All the students in my classrooms are great. They're bright, and overall, they're very kind. I've been inspired to just see how these students work, see how their minds work, see their values, how they were raised, and so forth. It has just been amazing to get to be part of this community in such a short amount of time. It’s really great to be here. A few kinks to work out, but other than that, you know, net positive.
What inspired you to become a math teacher?
What inspired me to become a math teacher was when I was in college pursuing Applied Math, I found that my math classes hadn’t really prepared me for what actual math was. I really discovered what the world of math was when I came to college and I realized it was way more than just calculus, way more than just algebra. There was discrete math, there was set theory, there were all these different worlds of math, always different problems to solve. And I found that in [secondary] school, I was constrained to do only just a few types of problems, you know? And in doing so, it really limited my view of what math was, but in college I learned math to be more than just a few sets of problems. It’s the field of problem-solving in general. It's the field of being able to describe abstract concepts, being able to manipulate them and be able to use it in a way that will allow you to write it down on paper so it can be understandable, to represent it in symbols and numbers that we can manipulate, right? And I wanted to be able to help with the process of bringing that to students. I feel like that process gets lost sometimes and I just wanted to be able to support those skills in high school and middle school education.
What do you enjoy doing outside of teaching?
I love listening to a good album, trying to find as much good music as I can. Other than that, probably my one true love in life is playing basketball. It’s just basketball, either watching the NBA or playing it myself. I enjoy that. So yeah, that’s really how I spend my time. And then trying to get into cooking as well. Big emphasis on “trying to”!
What type of music do you like to listen to?
I know a lot of people are familiar with “Chromakopia” right now [by Tyler the Creator]. That's a great one. Everyone loves that one, right? Jean Dawson is also someone that I love to hear. If you don’t know those two, I would love for people to check them out. Great artists.
What’s one interesting place that you’ve traveled to recently?
I've been in New Mexico for a hot air balloon festival. That was great, seeing how New Mexico is built really, just how the city is laid out and how the people are. They're very nice people and they're very chill.
This interview transcript has been lightly edited.
Photo credit: Darwynn Hsui of Photography Club