Cody Tabbert's Autobiography

            During a January thaw of 1978, my mother Deborah Tabbert brought a little baby boy into the world; I was that boy, Cody Tabbert, who was brought into existence on the twenty-sixth day of that month. My father, Michael Tabbert, and my mother decided that one kid running around the house wasn’t enough. I needed somebody to play with. Not even a year later, on January 18, 1979, my brother Shannon was born. We grew up together in a small touristy town, Onamia, located in central Minnesota just south of Mille Lacs Lake. Living so close to a lake, I fished a majority of my free time away, and I continue to do so today.
            Throughout my adolescent years in high school, I was involved in a variety of activities including basketball, choir, theater, knowledge bowl, and the National Honor Society to name a few. Rather than taking study halls my Junior and Senior years in high school, I chose to be a gym aide both years. These experiences provided me with my first introduction to working with students—which I enjoyed greatly—and started the spark that I may someday be a teacher, and be able to share my knowledge.
            After completing high school, I set a goal on becoming a math teacher. The first question I hear when I tell people my career choice, is “why math?” To answer this, I say that when I was in high school, I found math to come relatively easy to me. I understood what the teacher was talking about and I enjoyed reasoning through problems where I ultimately came out with an answer. It gave me a sense of completion and structure. I knew that math was a subject that a lot of people struggled with, and if I had a talent that I could excel at, why not continue in college studying math, and then try to share my knowledge later in life with younger people?
            Once in college at the University of Wisconsin River Falls (UWRF), I immediately became involved in my educational classes and jumped right into the schools. I started in the spring of 1997, volunteering as a track coach. Later that fall, I obtained a paid position as a junior high boys basketball coach. I coached the following year, and then I gave up coaching in exchange for a mathematics teaching position at a private school. I found the teaching position at Good Shepherd Christian Academy with the help of friends, and by word of mouth. During the school year of 1999/2000, I was quite busy. I had a full load of classes that whole year, and instead of coaching, I refereed basketball at local schools. I was doing everything I could to get as much experience as possible. I was involved tremendously in a lot of things at once, and I was having a great time. I tend to thrive under pressure, so this was not a problem.
            I love to travel. I took advantage of the national student exchange program at UWRF during the fall semester of the 2000/2001 school year. I went to school at the University of Hawaii Manoa. While diversifying my background and learning about another culture, I volunteered at the Boys and Girls Club of Hawaii. I found this to be a valuable experience that provided me with an opportunity to work with a variety of students.
            After completing my Bachelor of Science Secondary Education Degree, I continued my education at Minnesota State University Mankato (MSU) with a Master of Arts in Mathematics. At MSU my teaching experiences did not come to an end. I became a Teaching Assistant and over the course of two years I taught six classes of College Algebra. Interestingly enough, the last College Algebra class that I taught, over one-third of the students in my class were recommended to take College Algebra from me. I feel that this is evidence that I have learned a great deal from my past experiences and have implemented them.
            Currently I working for Minnesota State University Mankato as a fixed term instructor teaching and overseeing the developmental math program. My future plans are to continue my education and eventually pursue a doctorate degree in Education with a Mathematics emphasis. I feel that learning should never end, and that one should seek knowledge, because it just does not fall on a person’s lap. Therefore, I believe that I must try and experience as much as I can in order to strengthen my background for my ability to teach. One can only learn as much as one experiences.