Mark Weber * Hartnell Community College

*STUDENT GUIDE 2005* Life's Lessons

Mark Weber is a numbers guy. He doesn’t talk in color or think in hypotheticals. He’s a guy who lives by definitives. He’s a mathematician.

He may not sound like the kind of guy who’d draw much of a crowd. But tell that to the hundreds of Hartnell College students in Salinas who cram his lecture hall every week.

“Weber’s classes always fill up first,” one admissions clerk says.

It could be the fact that Weber teaches required math courses, so prospective graduates have no choice. But it’s not that simple. Weber is not that simple. His students get that.

“Generally, I end up with the largest classes,” Weber says. “The contract minimum for class size is 39. Most teachers don’t admit more than that. But I can’t bring myself to say no.”

The inability to say no is why Weber began teaching at Hartnell to begin with. It was 1986, and Weber had just graduated from the UC-Los Angeles with his master’s in math. Salinas was his home. It was where he knew he’d go after college.

“I heard [Hartnell] needed someone to teach calculus, and I thought I’d go ahead and do that for a while,” he says.

Hartnell was a place Weber knew well. He’d been a part-time student there during his senior year at North Salinas High School. The extra courses at the community college helped him get into UC-Berkeley, where he earned his bachelor’s degree before heading off to UCLA for his master’s.

Weber says that while teaching calculus paid the bills, he knew the calculus classroom was not his home.

“The people who are the math studs, who are really good in math, they’re almost autodidacts—they could learn on their own with a textbook. But what makes me feel I’ve done a good job is when a student comes up and says he’s never been able to understand math before, but now he can,” Weber says. “That’s what’s rewarding to me.”

It’s that kind of place, where students need him most, where Weber is at home.

“I focus on students who don’t major in math. A lot of the students who enter my classes are those who have it in their minds that they can’t do math. I like to show them that they really can,” he says.

Still, the students’ countless petitions for his classes are baffling to Weber. He lectures three classes, five hours a week. It could be monotonous. It isn’t. He’s getting through to them, even if he’s not sure how.

“I’d like to do more interactive teaching. With the amount of material I need to cover with such big classes, I can’t,” he says. “But it seems to work ok.”

It does, even if it isn’t always evident at the outset.

“Like most people, unless they’re pathologically confident, they’ll question the value of what they do. So, I sometimes wonder if I’m making a difference. But then I’ll hear from students, about how my class played a role in their ability to go on to university,” Weber says. “That’s when I realize there’s a lot of room for positive effect. Here’s something that intimidates them, and maybe I can help get them over that.”

Students have been cramming Weber’s classes for nearly 20 years. He’s fine with that, maybe even for 20 more.

“It was never the job where I’d get up in the morning and think ‘Oh, no, I have to do this.’ It’s the opposite. I can’t think of another career or vocation that I could ever enjoy more.” *