Bruce Anderson volunteering at Palm Beach State College. Kurtis Boggs/The Coastal Star
By Steve Pike
John F. Kennedy once said: “Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.”
Bruce Anderson was living that belief long before JFK entered the White House. The Gulf Stream resident continues to live by those words. Anderson, who retired from Bell Laboratories some 21 years ago, is providing leadership and learning as a tutor in the math lab at Palm Beach State College’s Lake Worth campus.
It’s a post-retirement job that for the 70-something Anderson is more passion than work. It’s a way of passing on the leadership and learning he’s gathered as a soldier, engineer, world-class sailor and teacher.
The math lab at PBSC is used by students — most of whom are between ages 25 and 35 — to help them prepare for accredited math courses they need to graduate. Anderson is paid a small stipend for the 30 hours per week he’s put in since this past August, but the real reward is helping the students accomplish their goals.
“You’re talking about mature people, many of whom have families and one and sometimes two jobs,” said Anderson, a father of three grown children who lives with his wife, Muriel, whom he affectionately calls “Murt.”
“I’ve long believed that a job without vision is drudgery,” said Anderson, who also is a bit of philosopher, fond of spinning phrases and short stories that have meaning. “If you can’t see what you’re doing has a meaning and a purpose to it, it’s just grind. These people have a vision and they have a focus on what they want to accomplish. My attitude is, we can’t let people like these fail.”
Failure has never been an option for Anderson, who was introduced to teaching as a graduate student at Ohio State University. Anderson chose grad school over the U.S. Olympic sailing team in the 1956 Melbourne Olympics.
“I went to school on the G.I. Bill (after serving in the Korean War) and they gave me an instructor’s position in the math department,” Anderson said. “I was the youngest guy in my class. All the other guys were World War II veterans who had stayed in the military. They wanted to get some grad degrees for the next level.
“It was very satisfying but I had no interest in being a teacher. I was going to be the guy in a gray fall suit. Corporate America was holding out it arms.”
After working briefly for a small electronics firm, Anderson landed with Bell Labs — the research arm of AT&T.
“I was surrounded by exciting people doing exciting things,” Anderson said.
Nothing classified, mind you, although Anderson did work on a project at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where he was nearly arrested for accidentally walking through the wrong door.
“It was supposed to have been a locked door,” Anderson said with a chuckle. “All of a sudden I was told to get face-down on the ground. I was asked, ‘What are you doing here?’ I told them I was just stretching my legs. Never a dull moment.”
Following his retirement, the Andersons moved from their Morristown, N.J., home to their current home along the Intracoastal Waterway. After she recovered from a severe illness, Murt encouraged her husband to get back into teaching. Bruce Anderson started out his second career at teaching math and physics at Fort Lauderdale Christian High School and then at Pope John Paul High School II in Boca Raton.
“I thought high school was the perfect spot,” Anderson said. “Nobody cares what you did before the age of 15; and by time you’re 25 your life is pretty well fixed. Don’t have to do everything right; you just avoid doing something tragically wrong.
“By the time you are 25, you’re that hobo walking down the railroad track with a stick over his shoulder and a bag at the end of it. That bag represents what you’ve got between your ears and those railroad tracks are heading toward tomorrow.”
It was at Pope John Paul in 2006 — his final year — that Anderson led a group of 12 students as they built a working hovercraft. That hovercraft, which the students drove over the football field, serves as the blueprint for Anderson’s teaching philosophy — a real-life lesson of why math is still relevant in today’s age of instant answers.
“When I’m asked the question, ‘Why do I need to know this?’ I can give them an answer other than it’s just in the curriculum,” Anderson said. “What it’s really all about isn’t pushing formulas around the table; it’s how you deal with failure. Are you going to bounce back or throw in the towel?
“When we built the hovercraft, [the students] had to figure out things like thrust over lift, the control system, the safety issues and the building materials. They had to design it and build it.”
And therein lays Anderson’s goals for his student on the PBC math lab — whether they’re in a prep class or a calculus class.
“Calculators today can solve very sophisticated rocket problems,” he said. “What is the force needed to accelerate a projectile up X number of feet? You can put in some data, push a button and here comes the number. Is that an educated person?
“My view is if you don’t understand what’s happening — force, acceleration, gravity — you don’t really understand the issues. You’re a technician and pushing a button. There’s a need for those people but unless they can understand the problem, what are they going to do if they get a problem that doesn’t fit the algorithm in the computer? Can you really think about it? How do you design something? It requires some pretty sophisticated background.”
Lab tutors begin teaching math with an attitude change
Palm Beach State College helps approximately 3,000 students each term (fall, spring and summer) at the Student Learning Center on its Lake Worth campus. Besides tutoring, the learning center helps its student population (from 120 countries around the world) develop independent learning skills necessary for college success.
The Math Lab has three full-time learning specialist supervisors; nine part-time learning specialists; one developmental lab specialist; two office assistants; and 31 tutors.
“It’s (tutoring) is not for everybody, but if a couple people can get happy with it and make a contribution, then so be it,” said Gulf Stream resident Bruce Anderson, who has served as a tutor in the Math Lab since August.
The Math Lab’s subject matter runs the gamut from noncredit prep work for such things as how to overcome math anxiety and how to study, to credit work to prepare students for upper level courses and graduate work.
“The Math Lab is designed to tutor people one-on-one and in small groups,” Anderson said. “We call them ‘mini-classrooms.’ ”
One of the lab’s goals, Anderson said, is to get the students — many of whom are between the ages of 25 and 35 — to understand that math is something they can learn and understand, despite what they might think going into the lab.
“We want to change your attitude,” toward math, Anderson said. “I tell them, ‘I guarantee if you put in the effort, we’ll get you across the bridge. I’ll personally make the commitment. I don’t work miracles but I’m here for you.’ ”
To become a member of the tutorial staff at the Math Lab, Reading Lab or English Lab at Palm Beach State College, contact Yoshua Carhuamaca in the lab at 561-868-3208.
Each tutor applicant must go through an interview process, and if, accepted, can work up to 30 hours per week at an hourly wage, depending on experience.
— Steve Pike
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