Gretchen Whipple: Warren Wilson College’s Math Anxiety Missionary
Lili Jones | February 8, 2024
Gretchen W. Whipple, a math professor at Warren Wilson College (WWC), has spent the past 23 years managing academic advising, helping students to overcome “math anxiety” and encouraging WWC students to explore their passions.
Whipple began her career in education by teaching high school mathematics in Virginia before getting her master’s degree. From there, she continued her education by getting a Ph.D. in mathematics from Louisiana State University. Whipple found WWC soon after completing her Ph.D. in 2001 and it was a perfect fit.
Whipple never thought she would teach mathematics in her undergraduate years, but chose to pursue it at the recommendation of one of her professors who noticed she was taking math classes for fun.
“I use math as an escape,” Whipple said. “I can play with math and it’s very manipulatable and controllable and sometimes we need pieces of our lives that we can control.”
While Whipple loves math, she knows that there is often a negative connotation associated with the subject. Overcoming “math anxiety” is one of the initial pursuits of any math class Whipple teaches. Math anxiety is a socially formed phobia of mathematics that stems most often from insecurities, sometimes caused by prior educational experiences with the subject. Whipple’s practice of teaching students about their brains and how to overcome fears stems from an interaction she had with a student.
“A student told me that she was going to fail Math for Liberal Arts (MAT 1110), and I told her she wasn't and I gave her an article about math anxiety, and she came back when she was a senior and said to me ‘if I'd read this as a freshman, I would have been the biology major I wanted to be,’ which broke my heart because she was a senior but she's done fine,” Whipple said. “She's very happy. And she charged me and told me that I needed to be a math anxiety missionary.”
As one of the first faces in the mathematics department that WWC freshmen meet, Whipple certainly qualifies as a math anxiety missionary.
“I’m not very threatening,” Whipple said. “I once taught at a private school where the principal told me I needed to be a little more like a drill sergeant. I told her that the 13-year-olds would laugh at me. And I think that's true — I don't have a whole lot of drill sergeant in my DNA, and I think that's a good thing as a math teacher because what students don't need is to be frightened into studying math. They need to be encouraged and cajoled sometimes and every so often, bribed.”
Mathematics is not the only subject of campus life that Whipple is involved in. She is also the Faculty Coordinator of Advising and has been for over 10 years. Whipple built the program that would eventually become the Center for Integrated Advising (CIAC) after complaints that faculty were not trained well enough to advise students. Now that the CIAC has been disbanded, Whipple is resuming her role as Faculty Coordinator of Advising.
“CIAC has built a lot of stuff, and we’re gonna run with that,” Whipple said. “So myself and a couple of other people are going to try not to go backward on advising. It’s about helping students to get where they want to be. One of the things that I learned long ago about myself in this position is that I am the least important person in most conversations — I'm talking to a student — and in that conversation, the student is much more important.”
Whipple can be spotted around campus, usually wearing very unique hats, but is most often found in Spidel Hall teaching.
To any student fearing their first math class at WWC, Whipple says, “Let’s play.”