More Than a Rock, 2nd Edition

26Finding the Needle

As teachers, the best we can do for our students and for the medium of photography is to constantly strive to become actually what we are potentially.

—Bill Jay

I didn’t grasp the value of a good teacher until my first semester as a university student, when I entered, with great trepidation, my first calculus class. Up to that point math had been a necessary but unpleasant presence in my studies, requiring monumental effort just to get by with a passing grade. I saw it as a dry, formulaic pursuit, devoid of creativity and insight. It did not fit with the way my brain worked, which tended to thrive on finding correlations and commonalities among seemingly unrelated things. Math seemed to stand alone, having little to do with ...