Daniel Daley III ’81

Professor Dan Daley’s association with NVU-Lyndon is a long one. He has three degrees from Lyndon: a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, another in meteorology, and a master’s degree in education. Since then, he has worked in Academic Support and the Project Excel program and, over the years, has been an adjunct in the math department at different times. He has now come home to Lyndon after a 26-year career as a high school mathematics teacher.

“I love to teach,” he says. “It is irrelevant to me if it is the addition of fractions or vector calculus.” He gets excited about finding the method that works for each student. Everyone can understand and feel comfortable with math, he explains. It just needs to be presented in the right way. “Literacy is always a big topic in education,” he says. “I believe numeracy is just as important.”

He has found that his highly interactive classroom style is most effective. He may start a class with a problem on the board and ask students to take the next step. In this way, not only do students stay fully involved, but he can see their weak spots. “You have to take them from where they are and build from that point” he explains. “They can’t plot a graph if they do not understand the underlying mathematics or what a graph represents.”