Steve Tuckey is more than just a math and science instructor at Jackson College
Steve Tuckey has been the George and Barbara Raven Endowed Chair for Mathematics since 2010. It has allowed him to blend his love for math and science with his passion for teaching and community outreach.
Raised by educator parents, Steve’s interest in math and science was ignited by his grandfather.
“He always looked for patterns and things to understand kind of what was going on,” Tuckey said. “He didn’t necessarily have the deepest understanding of math, but he would still manage to teach me things.”
Steve’s curiosity extended beyond the classroom. As a child, he loved Legos, a hobby he continues to enjoy as an adult.
“For me it was about patterns and being curious about patterns in nature, in numbers and just all over the place. Being able to recognize those patterns and use them to do some cool stuff,” he said.
This culminated in high school when he started learning about astronomy and physics when the subjects started to click for him seeing patterns in the night sky and the way objects move.
“The fact we’re able to know what we know about the entire universe based on our position here on this tiny little planet and we’re able to infer so much about what we see and understand just by virtue of what we experience here most of it just through the light that we receive from other places, it’s pretty cool,” he said.
Steve’s journey at Jackson College began in 2002 as an adjunct instructor, teaching conceptual physics and natural science. After a stint teaching at a high school outside Detroit, he and his wife, Alana – who is an associate professor and math faculty at Jackson – decided to return to Jackson to be closer to his aging parents. Inspired by Alana’s experience, he joined the full-time faculty in 2009 and later would become the endowed chair.
A role that has provided him with the time and resources to engage in outreach programs, collaborate on educational innovations among other contributions.
“Working on looking at better ways of teaching, different ways of approaching curriculum and assessment and using funds that are provided by that endowment to be able to do some cool stuff here on campus,” he said.
Teaching for Steve is a mixture of wide-ranging emotions while also being an enriching experience.
“It’s exhausting, mentally taxing, tedious, chaotic, frustrating and it’s wondering, invigorating and it’s enriching beyond compare,” he said. “It’s never the same. If ever I feel like I’m teaching the exact same thing, I just look around and I notice that no two classrooms can ever really be the same.”
One of Steve’s most rewarding projects was creating a pre-statistics course to help students bridge gaps in their math knowledge aligning with similar initiatives like the Carnegie Math Pathways’ Statway.
“It was interesting to see we were putting together a lot of the same curricular ideas, tools and project orientation and that was very rewarding. It was one of the first times that I’d ever really designed not just a course but a curriculum that was going to be taught by lots of people,” Tuckey said.
Outside of teaching, Steve has many hobbies. He is a drummer and president of local singing group, the Jackson, Michigan Chorale, and enjoys visiting museums.
“I like to tell people half-jokingly that my job is my hobby because so many aspects of my job are kind of all over the place. I really like astronomy, and I get to play at a giant telescope and have fun using equipment here on campus.”
As the lead faculty for natural science, astronomy and differential equations, Steve finds great joy in igniting students’ curiosity.
“I genuinely love working with people who are eager, interested, curious even if they don’t realize it at the beginning of a class, sometimes getting exposed to things in a subject like science or in math when suddenly something is like, ‘that’s kind of cool,’ and you realize the light has just switched on,” Tuckey said.
Steve appreciates the diverse learning environment at Jackson College, emphasizing that it’s never too late to pursue education.
“If there’s a subject that interests you, we probably have a class in it or adjacent to it where you can learn, explore and try things. The faculty who are here, we love to teach. We fundamentally are here because we love teaching and we love working with students,” Tuckey said.
Steve holds a bachelor’s in physics and mathematics and a master’s in science and math curriculum and assessment from Michigan State University.