To whom Ma+h Matters
I first learned that Colette Nichols is also a math tutor in mid-August of this year. At that point, she was about thirty years into her tutoring career. Nichols and I are both employed by a large corporate bank and had been part of the same organization until she moved to another team shortly before the pandemic was declared. We both spent two years working from home before reconnecting.
We were seated in front of a coffee shop in Founders Hall, an airy two-story atrium with marble floors and an enormous, vaulted ceiling in uptown Charlotte, when she informed me that she had just registered a 501c3 nonprofit called Ma+h Matters NC.
We have met several times since to discuss Nichols’ ambition to share her love of math on a grand scale with 7th through 12th graders in the region. “You know, everyone has a relationship with math from their school days whether it’s good, bad, and I think everybody remembers that experience,” she told me.
Her own experience was positive, “I always felt confident in math, and I think it was because I was always surrounded with it at home, with my mother being a math – an algebra teacher,” she said.
Nichols acknowledged that although she loved the subject matter, studying math was not always easy, “My most challenging course was in graduate school. It was a topology course. I mean, I worked really, really hard in that course and I was frustrated because I knew I would get an A and should have gotten an A with all the effort I put into it. And so, I think that was the first time I really felt frustrated with math. But I didn’t give up.”
Recently, Nichols applied for a challenging role within the bank as a data scientist. She was selected for the position and is currently coming up to speed with her new responsibilities. The new job is not her only concern, “My tutoring has ramped up in the past year or so because of word of mouth and tutoring college students,” she said.
“Most of this tutoring, in particular, is independent and it’s paid tutoring,” Nichols continued, “But I also want to help students learn through the non-profit Math Matters. But yeah, it is hard to fit it all in and I try to fit it in because I love it. I love tutoring, I love helping students and I want students to be helped. So, that’s a balancing act.”
Nichols has attempted this balancing act before. “I had some successful programs in 2011 and 2012 and I felt some sense of fulfillment in a sense. And then work got busy and I put it on the shelf again. It was really grassroots,” she related.
Nichols has been pursuing a banking career and tutoring in the Charlotte area for over 20 years. She has worked with programs sponsored by churches and in Charlotte-Mecklenburg high schools. Most recently she tutored with a Charlotte-based organization called Heart Math Tutoring.
“I tutored with Heart [Math Tutoring] during the pandemic, the height of the pandemic. And it was interesting because one of the biggest challenges was students being present and alert and engaged via Zoom. So, getting the material across to them wasn’t necessarily the most challenging part. It was keeping them engaged and alert,” Nichols said.
According to Nichols, Ma+h Matters NC will be designed to capitalize on the flexibility that individual tutors have, “We have a little bit more freedom to do a little bit more with the student, take our time, cater to their individual needs a little bit more.”
Nichols has plenty of experience in doing a little bit more with her time. She is also a distance runner who works out three to five mornings a week. She allowed me to interrupt a run in Central Park with an interview via FaceTime. Nichols had travelled to New York City with a group of friends who were running the NYC Marathon.
Over the course of the past year, Nichols has grappled with questions about personal growth and achieving fulfillment. Developing Ma+h Matters NC will require sacrificing other interests, at least temporarily. “I still struggle with busyness = accomplishment and so it’s hard for me to put some of these other things down and balance and say no to things that do not fit into the major pillars where I should focus,” she admitted.
However, she also believes that we are all obligated to serve others and is confident in her ability to positively impact students, “I really do believe that one of the gifts God has blessed me with is the gift to help students learn math,” Nichols said.
She wants her legacy to include generations of students whose confidence and mathematical ability are in part thanks to her talent. She envisions a stint teaching at Oprah’s school in South Africa.
Nichols is prepared to dedicate the next season of her life to developing Ma+h Matters NC into a robust, scalable program that could move the dial on math achievement for the US.
This ambitious vision is shared by Bob Woods, who has been living and volunteering in the Charlotte area for the past 20 years. He is working with Nichols to develop Ma+h Matters NC. Woods credits his mother with instilling in him a sense of the importance of serving others. “My Mom had to sacrifice a lot and she had very little raising four kids as a single parent. But she still had time to help others. She still had time to be participating in various community organizations,” he said.
The challenges of scaling the fledgling nonprofit appealed to Woods, a trained statistician, “I think that Ma+h Matters is a great opportunity from a program perspective or organization because there’s big need across the Charlotte area as well as nation-wide when it comes to math.”
Woods currently chairs two nonprofit boards. When I asked for the key element to a successful organization, he replied, “It’s the people.”
He held up the Y as a model organization for, “serving all,” and inspiring dedication in its staff. “These staffers are individuals that started out just coming to summer camp at the Y. And then from there some of them have evolved to being counselors and then from counselors, went through the leadership program and then going off to school and realized that they want to serve the community. And they’re back with the Y. And you have a high percentage of staffers that do that. And they’re referred to as Lifers,” Woods said.
Woods believes that influencing students who benefit from Ma+h Matters NC to recognize the value of volunteerism and to consider tutoring others in their turn, is critical to the program’s success. He also noted that several area universities require their students to complete service hours, which could prove an important source of tutors.
Nichols met with staff from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School Board last month and is preparing a proposal for Ma+h Matters NC’s inaugural program. The officers of Ma+h Matters NC have a series of daunting tasks ahead as they determine how to grow their program into a stable resource for area math students.
When the list feels endless, Nichols thinks of her gift, her legacy and instances that remind her why she believes that building Ma+h Matters is her calling. She told me about an encounter on her way into the gym, when she was stopped by a young adult who recognized her from his high school days. “Hey! Did you do a math program at Harding High School?” the man asked. “I remember you! I was in that math program. I remember it! It was really good!”
There is more to the Ma+h Matters story: