Michele Bird, an assistant professional lecturer for the UW Department of Math and Statistics, says life brought her to Laramie, Wyoming.
“I left a PHD program, kind of towards the end of it, and landed in Laramie and really, really like it here,” Bird said. “I came back here because my family was here, in part.”
Bird received her undergrad and Masters degrees in psychology from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV).
“I originally started teaching psychology because my degrees were all in psychology. I was working on the PHD experimental psych at UNLV and I got a job at LCCC teaching intro psych. They lost a stats professor, and I asked if I could start teaching the stats classes,” Bird said.
“I probably had no business doing it that first semester, I had to reteach myself most of it, but it ended up being a favorite topic,” Bird said.
Bird said she likes statistics a lot more than psychology, because she has the opportunity to teach skills for students to use throughout college. The classes she teaches are mostly introduction courses and a First Year Seminar courses.
“Next semester I’ll be teaching another First Year Seminar. It integrates a lot of the transition skills they want students to have, like critical thinking skills and note taking or test taking. The more I teach the big section, the more I find out that students aren’t getting that out of high school anymore.
“They aren’t being taught how to take a test, or how to effectively study. I look at students who might struggle in my class, and to a great degree it’s just because they don’t know the tricks and the tips,” Bird said.
Last semester, Bird said she tried to teach hybrid courses but they were too difficult. Now, her classes are all online.
“My main goal is to instill the curiosity to find out, not so much how to do specific things with what you’re reading or what you’re hearing. Basically how to assess your sources and find out if those numbers are real,” Bird said.
“The whole COVID-19 thing has been super tricky because none of the numbers are very trustworthy and you get a lot of conflicting numbers from different places, so I think it’s really difficult to have a really good picture of what’s happening,” Bird said.
According to Bird, the pandemic hasn’t changed her life outside of academia very much.
“Our [referring to her and her boyfriend] hobbies are camping and rockhounding, so I spend a lot of time out in the wild by myself or with friends, anyway. I’ve never been a clothes shopper or somebody who enjoys a lot of that. I don’t really enjoy retail therapy. Bart’s Flea Market is my thing, I’ll wander through the thrift stores,” Bird said. “I don’t think much has changed for me.”
Bird said she rides her horse a lot with her riding partner, since it’s easy to social distance at the stables.
“I think the biggest changes have really been in the job and it’s made it hard, because you don’t feel like you can have the same interaction with people,” Bird said.
