“The Condition”
The Story of an American Math Tutor
You might not look up the words library or tutoring center in the dictionary while mad dashing your way past traffic on Eagleson Avenue to walk up to the Multicultural building.
Students are dazed. Flushed away from the chatter and laughs from the outside to crickets and elevator dings inside.
The building is home to the offices that control the functions of the 21st Century Scholars Program along with the Hudson & Holland Scholars, and Groups Scholars programs. The programs meet with students to develop resources for students to achieve their academic goals and build on their career development.
Nothing much will intrigue students to come into the building.
However, down in the basement, there is much of a forgotten mine where the sound escapes, and the studying begins.
It is set up like a massive conference area. Blonde seats meet with aging red and grey chairs to somehow keep students occupied to work on, well, work on schoolwork from 9 am-7 pm Monday through Friday.
To students on the Phoenix academic probation program, or on the verge of being dismissed from IU, this is a room that many of them want to forget ever stepping into when they graduate.
Life is slow in the study hall. Not much to do and nothing to see except students walking passing by the nearby parking garage, and heading east towards either the dormitories of Wright Hall and Willkie or heading the chatter past the Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center.
The air conditioner above hums in one tone. It either gets really chilly or hot in the room for 10 hours a day, Five days a week.
Snacks are provided in the corner of the study room in a small snack tray. Sporting a few store-bought granola bars and cases of Kroger bottled waters to keep people occupied.
Everything is structured and everything is slow in here. Printers printing documents and eight older desktop computers with dusted screens line the walls of the room. Sometimes it sits vacant.
A sign that feels reminiscent of one hung in the first hallway of a public elementary school gives some much-needed motivation to make the room feel at home. It said, “Success: Don’t just wish for it, work for it!”
Just sign into the clipboard, greet the spotter who will keep an eye on you to do your work, write down your school email, and the time at the exact marker, sit, study, sign out, and then move on with the rest of the day.
At the back of the study room, the clock in Helvetic scripture signs the time of 11:26 a.m. on Tuesday, September 26.
It is also another, slow Tuesday for longtime math tutor, Scott Salak, who sits in a corner of the room right by the doors leading to the parking lot parking doors that he, along with other staff members that walk by, can unlock with a key.
At this point, he had just clocked in and was sipping on his morning coffee and a small croissant.
Other students are also munching on granola bars, eating lunch, and clacking away on their computers, or scanning a textbook.
The first student walks in at 11:30 a.m., and plops down on the study desk, ready to work on some Algebra One homework.
“God, how exciting,” she tells her friend on the phone before ultimately hanging up. She turns her phone off to now put on her thinking cap and study with Salak.
As the girl plops down, her Chanel purse on the desk, stressed about the Algebra test, Salak is calm. Casually whistling to a bird tune from the Looney Toons.
By the time he comes in, she is pulling up an assignment on her Finite Canvas website, and he sits down next to her to discuss tree diagrams.
As Salak took his seat, cup of joe in hand, scrambling through papers to just find her assignment, the moments of morning youth turned into a bit of stress while scrambling through the documents to find her assignment.
“Let me locate it, I think, isn’t it the assignment with the tree diagrams?” He said.
The girl nods in approval, yet she is utterly confused already. Salak reassures her to not feel as confused as she already appears to be.
Then Scott Salak got into what makes him unique. Being a calm, reassuring math tutor. Guiding the student on her road to get through this section of the class.
Her job was to solve the probability of the equation which involves solving the equation by using a tree-like diagram to help calculate the total probabilities of decision making.
To the student, and many other nonmath majors, this concept could seem utterly confusing, but he tries to explain it as best as he can to the student.
After a while, Salak draws a scribbled portrait of the problem in his version on a scrambled piece of paper. He turns from a low-paid math tutor to Vincent Van Gogh. In a matter of ten minutes or so, he is already calming the student down. Going through each math equation step by step, that even involved solving shapes to get the answers for the various equations of Algebra.
At one point, she asks him about a problem featuring finding the property of the number 60x in the diagram.
He told her what students and staff, even himself, say makes him great.
Relate Algebra, Geometry, and any math equation you can think of, and apply it to the real world.
He reassures the student who seems to have her hands on her head, utterly confused, and tells her something that turns out to become the central theme of this story.
At points, she sighs. Still utterly confused, and scrambling to figure out what the diagram should equal. Leaving her overwhelmed and more confused than ever.
“So.. that…” she takes a massive sigh and chuckles a little stress laugh in the distance.
He tells her, “Math is like in a game, if you think of a boxing ring, it shows that all the sides are the same.”
The math problems became like a symphony to her brain. After a while, he comes back to being calm as her stress, isn’t all the way relieved, but he makes her confident. She only wished to him that if she only enjoyed math like music from now, on she wouldn’t stress as much.
That is in fairness, hearing students praise what they have done with his work, is purely music to his ears.
Music means a lot of different things to Salak, through music, he can connect, strengthen the sound, and sync the beats to become a masterpiece.
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Salak was a very interesting subject to chat about, not just about math, but also about the essence of life.
He seems quirky yet quiet on the surface. Sitting down with me, he told me that he is rarely spoken to. Even by the press. Which made him surprised, yet very delighted to open up about his life before he ever became a math tutor.
In an interview inside the Multicultural building, Salak said his background was not never in studying math. It was in studying electronics, particularly in Ham Radio.
“A long time ago, I was probably in grade school. I was seven or eight years old, I had this flashlight at home. It just didn’t work, so my dad opened it up and took the battery out, and then he also took the light ball out of the end of it.” Salak said.
“… and so he used it like a paperclip or a little piece of wire and got the ball to glow. And I thought that was the coolest thing because it was not in the flashlight so apparently the switch or something was broken in the flashlight. So anyway, he made this malt glow. And I was just like … wow, that’s cool! And my dad wasn’t there by any means. It’s an era. He was like a salesman kind of guy. Nobody knew enough about electricity to make a simple kind of service. And so that kind of sparked my interest right there. As a kid in grade school and middle school, I started building little circuits with light bulbs and little motors. And then they get more complex, maybe with switches and more balls and motors.”
“I don’t think I was as bad as we pictured like the mad scientist or anything like that. I don’t think it was quite.” He said about Ham Radio, “I was quite that. But I’ve learned a lot. I’m going to do my own thing. So that’s why it was sort of a natural fit just to go on and study more [about] electronics.”
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Salak speaks to many of the students who struggle with math because he was once one of them.
He has been the head math specialist for a total of 26 years at IU and part-time at Ivy Tech Community College.
He is also the head tutor for the Groups Scholars Program which provides students with services to improve their academic performance and strengthen in their low spots.
After struggling in high school, he attended Harold Washington Community College as part of the City Colleges of Chicago, and unlike most math tutors, he was studying the art of radio theory and technology. Not in math. Which makes students relate to his background a lot better.
He said it wasn’t that he wasn’t interested in math, however, his hobbies led him to a professor who saw that he had another gift in him while in college.
How Salak, a student studying electronics and radio theory got into math tutoring was thanks to two types of resources. His professors in Chicago, and in particular, an advertisement in a Chicago newspaper.
“I was living in Chicago at the time. And I started taking classes at the City Colleges of Chicago and at the time that was called the Harold Washington College, right in downtown Chicago.” He said. “So I used to hop on the L train, the elevated train. I was living up on the north side at the time in Rogers Park. Trying to recall I think I was taking classes and part-time evening classes because I was working during the day. Then I think, I just noticed that on campus there was something about the tutoring center. Maybe they were looking for help, so I started working part-time at their tutoring center.
It was a lot. I worked for 10–15 hours a week, if that, it was just a few afternoons here or there kind of thing. And so that’s how I got into the whole process. And I really, at that point was doing that I didn’t realize, hey, this is this was cool. Working students and helping them with things and you’re helping them understand things.”
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The next day, September 27, around 4:15 p.m., the day was slower than the last for Salak. No students showed up needing his attention.
During his time passing from working, he sat at his desk reading one of the many math journals and newspapers sorted on his long scrambled desk. Glossing over article after article from the Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift relationship, to disturbing reports about the poor math results students possess across the United States.
Math tutors like him have been facing a very daunting task to not only teach math to students but to also keep students memorizing the concepts and somehow squeeze into possessing decent test scores.
In 2023, three years removed from the COVID-19 pandemic, tutors, math teachers, and professors at grade schools and universities are entering an ultimate breaking point.
According to the 2022 NAEP Mathematics Assessment Report provided by “The Nation’s Report Card”, math scores have dropped with both fourth and eighth graders by a dizzying total of 13 points compared to 2019.
All over the country, from Maine down south to Puerto Rico, and as west as Indiana through Alaska, the United States of America is seeing the lowest overall math scores ever recorded in history since math scores were first globally tracked at the turn of the 17th Century.
According to reports, the average fourth grader is not proficient in mathematics compared to scores dating back to 1985.
The average eighth grader has shown a decreased score of eight points lower compared to the last time scores were tested in 2019. That year, scores were recorded averaging at 282. In 2022, the score was 274.
These decreasing scores are testing the limits of job security for an American math teacher.
With an already ongoing teacher shortage across the country, Indiana has been one of the states hit the hardest by the shortage of teachers.
In 2022, The Indianapolis Star reported that during a pre-pandemic period in 2019, Indiana only scored 37 percent of students in elementary and middle schools as proficient in math.
It even includes a steady 2.5 percent improvement in math scores compared to 2023 where the numbers dropped thanks to the global lockdowns and lack of school caused by the COVID-19 Pandemic.
In community colleges, there has also been a decrease in college professors. According to Inside Higher Education, there has been an 8.6 percent drop in professors teaching at community colleges, at 282,000 teachers, compared to the increased number of 309,000 professors teaching in 2019.
Salak has turned the focus to the math problem in schools to three varying factors. He described the problems in distractions which could be linked to the expansion in technology, student isolation from the COVID lockdowns, mask-wearing, and even some of the math courses taught at Indiana University.
“I think the decline has a lot to do with the fact that students are staying at home and trying to learn, you know, online,” Salak said. “I’ve had many students tell me that that was a wasted year to where they were supposedly well at home, but supposedly learning online. In a nutshell, it just seemed okay, they were watching the instructor on their computer and the teacher wasn’t gonna tell them okay, this is what we’re doing. But I don’t know, it’s like they weren’t engaged so much.”
He also said, “Maybe other distractions, you know, when they instruct their teachers on their computer, I think it’s so easy to get a cell phone and two other things. I’m not sure, but it just sounds like there were a couple of last years there being at home, or some other location. I don’t think the real absorption of the topics was taking place. So compared to maybe 10–15 years ago. Students were of course in class and every day attending school for the most part. And, you know, focused on it. So another thing too, so 10–15 years ago, we didn’t have cell phones like we didn’t do now. That was a relatively new thing. Just maybe what I think back 15 years ago, maybe once in a while I would see a person carrying something kinda large that was a cell phone, but it wasn’t very common like today.”
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For most of Salak’s adult life, besides being interested in electronics and Ham Radio, he was also into one more thing, being a musician.
Until 1988, he was a part of The Special Consensus Bluegrass Band. A very successful country bluegrass band that continues to travel the country and even tour around the world. Their headquarters are based in Chicago.
The band was founded by Greg Cahill, the lead banjo player, in 1975, who did not respond to our requests for comments about Salak’s role in the band. However, since the absence of Salak, he has watched the band become nominated for a Grammy Award in 2018, and tour the world without him.
While at the band, he played the banjo and traveled around the world touring on shows with his bandmates, doing dances, and most importantly, selling out venues and doing everything they could to entertain the audience no matter what.
“We would go down to Florida, we’d go out to Pennsylvania and New York. Viana, and Scotsman.” He said, “We went up to Alaska one time, and played a couple of shows. And we were and then we got involved in doing the music for a play. And so that was a little more upscale because they really, we had stayed in nice hotels and made some good money. And we were just doing our own thing.”
Then he said, “It was often sleeping on somebody’s floor and somebody at the theater or restaurant or wherever we were playing. The owner would say you can stay over at my house or so and so’s house. Do you guys have any sleeping bags? So it was quite an adventure.”
His craziest story was when a bar owner in the 1980s in Texas was robbed right before a show started, which taught Salak about the importance of calculating money.
“… then another wild time was we were in Texas somewhere playing and I saw kind of a commotion up towards the front where the bar and the cashier was. I mean that a huge thing was just sort of something that didn’t look right. Anyway, there were people all around sitting at tables and chairs and we were still playing anyway. We took a break and we all kind of wandered down front and came to find out. Somebody had robbed us like we were flooded. I didn’t see guns. But you know it’s Texas baby.
The experience with the bandmates continued to register through the way he was as a person, and shockingly, a mathematician. Music, he would tell me, describes notes, the money, and making the band for helping him get to where he is now. Working an everyday job and understanding everyday people.
After learning quite a bit about music, he has since applied his life to teaching and spending time with family, coworkers, and new friends. To end talks about his music career, he was talking about restarting a band with some of his friends at the American Legion Post 18 in Bloomington.
His group is still in development, but he hopes to begin playing live shows at the Legion regularly later this year. There is no word on when that is going to happen from either Salak or his band members.
One defining thing about math Salak uses is the memorization of musical notes. In the case of Algebra or Geometry to somehow strike a cord in math students at IU and beyond to succeed and stress less.
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Back on September 26 at 3 p.m. under the basement of the Multicultural building, also known as the study tables, began to attract more people to get out of a thunderstorm rolling outside.
It started as a popup shower and eventually a large gust of wind and rain started falling on the ground outside. Thunder roared outside. For one student, the true thunder in her mind was getting louder while she was finishing her Geometry homework.
Salak met with her for three hours as the rain poured outside, and students came in and out of the room. Doing the original daily structure of the study tables.
Typing, eating, working, studying, reading, printing, working.
The female student was very stressed, so stressed he had to reassure her to not feel confused. Just like the overhead thunder outside he knew what to do. The girls seemed to be very stressed until he started grabbing his phone and pulling up the GarageBand tuning app on his phone.
With many employees and students considering going home or going back to their dorms and enjoying the night, his work was not finished. He was able to fully understand what the problem was with her work which was solving a triangular equation.
She suffered an anxiety attack, and he wanted her to think of the steps that it took to get from counting down the equation to falling forward with the right number as the answer for the calculation by playing a simple piano sound on his phone.
Like learning a musical note at a music class in elementary school, he played the lowest note on the piano, an A chord.
As a reporter, I noticed a humongous shift in her demeanor. Salak calmed her down right away. He even promised her that no matter how long it took to get that one problem done, he would make sure that she got it right the first time so she could memorize it again.
The rain fell, but the true Sunshine arose through the windows in the basement of the building. The student, who said struggled in math the entire time she has been at IU, finally felt like she broke herself by paying ever more attention to the work.
This is because Salak will do something math tutors usually do not do.
Again, memorize math through the art of music.
She did not know this at that moment, but her anxiety was relaxed and her mindset tranced away from anxiety and was set on math.
“One of the best what they call it sort of comments I ever received is from a student who I worked with for a while, and one day, she turns to me and she goes, you know, Scott or Mr. Scott she goes, “You are the Bob Ross of math tutoring,” Salak said. “That was like really I said oh that’s wonderful thank you I appreciate that.”
He remembered the incident and told me, “The way you know a guitarist tuning his instrument, and thinking of the keys on the piano is how I study math. The things are laid out I’m sure they could be looked at as some sort of math in a relationship and all of that too. Music is a tune. Math is the note, the key of sorts, to solving a problem.”
Days later in early October, her brother, who also worked with Salak on a few math problems, also thanked him for her help after he needed help in math too. That moment gave the true rays of what his job is meant to do.
But do some students not grasp his material? No one knows, but Salak doesn’t care.
His pipes sing not only if a student gets a C on a test. He wants his scholars to come in, and guess the answer while having an A+ attitude.
In the case of one student, he said, “I can only think of only one time when a student was upset with the tutoring that I was giving them and I said, “Wow,” and this was quite a while ago this was, 15 maybe 20 years ago and I was like really what’s wrong and so they received this horrible score on a test they showed me and all these things were wrong and I had told them all the wrong things wow well come to find out after a few days this student was gone they had received F in everything. Not only math, but it was like their English or whatever the other courses were and so I think they may have been either just upset and wanted to lay it on somebody else.”
In the end, the so-called, “Bob Ross of math tutoring,” overlooks the sight of an American college campus, overlooks through a sea of heartbreak as said by the Special Consensus Band, and finds the rough spots around the system’s inner careers.
Math has become a “lost ship adrift from the sea,” in failing social norms in education to social issues.
We ask, “How did we lose math in America?” How did we as the richest nation on Earth, fail our kids?”
Salak sees the outside world but handles it from within. Through the sea of tears, there is always a lost student he needs to rescue at sea. Tutoring students to become scholars slowly through patience and song.
