s the frst NMC faculty member to attain the 50-year teaching milestone, you might say math instructor Steve Drake has had a multiplier effect. At least six current NMC math faculty members had him as a teacher. So did a former math department chairman at Traverse City West High School. Even a professor who’s gone on to dual positions at both Harvard and Washington University in St. Louis. Drake’s disciples tell a similar story of an instructor both respected and liked, who not only has a mastery of the material, but has mastered presenting a subject that often challenges students, and who, at 79, still enjoys going to work. “He truly made me love math. I had a very hard time in school with math, and he changed the entire way I thought about math,” says Liberty Vittert, a visiting statistics professor at Harvard University, who had Drake in 2005. “Most people think (math) is a thing they’ve got to get past,” says NMC adjunct instructor Jason Teichman, who frst took a class from Drake in the summer of 1999.
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