Jeff Hood introduces himself to the audience, Oct. 3. (Stephanie Garcia)

A year is a quarter of college for most students; four years is the complete experience. But there’s another side to that timeframe; there are those whose college experiences stretch from four years to six, eight or more, and from there into decades.

Jeff Hood has taught mathematics for over 20 years. In that time, he’s interacted with hundreds of students. However, while Hood has stayed steady in one place at a time for most of that timeframe, his students have come and gone, rarely staying in his life for more than four years at a time.

Hood spoke Tuesday, Oct. 3, about the brief intersections he experiences with students before they part ways. True to form, he described the phenomena with a mathematical term: tangents, or the point where two lines briefly touch before parting ways.

Students, faculty and attendees come together for the Last Lecture Series “Tangents: The Connections We Make” with Jeff Hood, Oct. 3. (Stephanie Garcia)

Hood said he tries to focus on making sure students get what they need rather than what he thinks might be best.

“I’ve been teaching for over 20 years. And when you teach, you gotta remember, you gotta constantly remind yourself that it’s about the students, it’s not about me, it’s not about what I want. It’s about what they need, what they want,” Hood said.

In keeping with the theme of prioritizing students, Hood’s talk conveyed what he thought students have taken from his classes as they went out into the world to pursue their goals.

“But from their own perspective, they’ve taken what I’ve been able to give them and what all of our faculty have been able to give them and they’ve done what they wanted to do. And so honestly, if you can say that at the end of the day, you’ve probably done okay,” Hood said.

The talk Hood gave was part of the Last Lectures series, which asks the speakers to prepare a hypothetical “last lecture” – what the speaker would want to present if they could only give one more talk in their life.

Jeff Hood discusses the profound influence students and individuals have had on shaping his life, Oct. 3. (Stephanie Garcia)

Hood said he chose his topic because he wanted to share how passionate he was about cherishing the time people have with each other.

He added that teaching is a bittersweet experience, with the highs of imparting a lifetime of knowledge followed by the lows of saying goodbye.

“It’s the most beautiful, profound thing to give someone what you’ve studied your entire life to have, and then they can do with it whatever they want,” Hood said, adding, “All you can do is give it to them, and then they leave. And so it’s beautiful, it’s terrifying and it’s the dichotomy of being a teacher.”

Around 60 people attended the lecture, comprised mostly of professors and students.

The audience listens as Jeff Hood shares his memories of the people who have left their mark on his life over the years, Oct. 3. (Stephanie Garcia)

Hood said he hoped people enjoyed the lecture and took away some meaning from it.

“I hope it went okay. But the impression that I’m getting from the folks that I’ve talked to just since it finished is that they’ve enjoyed it, and I’m glad they did. Did I notice things that I could have done better? Yep! But I’m a perfectionist, and I think if I could do it a hundred times, would this have been the best one? No, but would it have been the worst one? Certainly not. So I’m happy with the talk, I’m happy with the turnout. I think a lot of people enjoyed it, and I hope that’s the case,” Hood said.

Overall, Hood said sharing his expertise in mathematics with students for over two decades has been a deeply emotional and joyful experience because of the beauty he sees in the subject.

“The perspective of math from the outside is that it’s hard. It’s logical, it’s cold and calculating. When you’re on the inside, it is a profoundly beautiful art. It’s a profoundly wondrous thing,” Hood said, later adding “Mathematics, the higher up you go, the less it becomes about numbers and calculation, and the more it becomes about truth, which is a profoundly beautiful thing. So, the higher up you go, the more you study it, the more artistic and the more open-hearted you become.”