After 7 years of accounting, David Jones went back to school to find a career in something he’s more passionate about. Little did he know that in 8 years time, he would be pursuing that passion in the same classroom he came looking for it. In the 8 years following that, David Jones would be a mathematics professor at College of the Sequoias, and he couldn’t be happier.
When Jones first started going back to school, he had no plans of becoming a math teacher. In wanting to find work he could be passionate about, Jones originally set out to become a game developer. Jones’ then enrolled in some classes at COS, his local community college. While he did have a bad experience in his first programming class, he still liked the math that was involved in these courses. This began Jones’ journey down the road of mathematics.
This is when Jones’ passion for teaching began. While he was taking these math classes, he eventually began to tutor his fellow classmates, both before his own classes started, and afterwards in the MESA center at COS. As his former professor and now co-worker Jon Blakely fondly recalls, “walking into [his] summer class to find David working problems on the board for the rest of the class. [He] took a seat in the back and it took him a few minutes before he turned around and saw [him]. Come to find out, he was doing this every day,”
Jones didn’t stop at teaching his fellow classmates. He would begin tutoring in the MESA center, so much so that he would be hired on to run workshops, essentially working as an student instructor for the center. During a semester of summer school, Jones would begin to tutor a pair of students struggling for C’s. These students would go as far as to ask him to come to Starbucks after the MESA center closed in order to continue tutoring. This would continue for the whole semester, and by the end that pair of students would earn A’s in their course. Getting an incredibly rewarding feeling from helping these students grow, this is where Jones would first begin considering becoming a teacher.
After he graduated from COS, and later earning a bachelor’s at the University of California Merced, Jones still wasn’t sure where to go career wise. Jones would intern for a bit at NASA, but he’ll be the first to say that getting to brag about working at NASA was the only fun part of working there, as the work he was actually doing was mundane, and not very fulfilling. Instead, he continued going to school, getting his masters at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
The same pattern happened here, where Jones would begin tutoring fellow students after class, the rewarding feeling of helping students along their journey returned. Initially considering getting a PhD in astrophysics, and becoming Dr. Jones, just as the famed archaeologist Indiana, it was at this point that Jones realized the passion he was looking for all those years ago, was under his nose the whole time. As cool as it would be to introduce himself as Dr. Jones, he wasn’t passionate about astrophysics research. What he was really passionate about was teaching math. There was a genuine joy in helping students, guiding them on their path to success. So he forwent the title of Doctor, and settled on Professor Jones instead, finishing his journey right where he started, teaching at College of the Sequoias.
