Rosalie Abraham

Increasing the Probability of Success

Rosalie Abraham
Professor of Mathematics, North Campus

Of all the comments Professor Rosalie Abraham has heard from her students, one always stands out as a real compliment to her as a teacher. The student told her, “If they don’t get it with you, Mrs. Abraham, they’re not going to ever get it.”

“It” refers to mathematics, her passion since childhood. Born in London, she grew up in Trinidad. Her mother first noticed her innate abilities with numbers when Rosalie was a child playing card games with her three brothers. “My mother saw the magic take place in my brain,” she said.

Professor Abraham uses creative classroom exercises and a patient, methodical teaching approach, which helps her North Campus students better understand mathematics. “We can do this slowly, and individually if need be, because we’re not teaching in a university auditorium where there may be 200 students. We have 25 students in a class. That’s the beauty of a community college.”

Abraham’s talent in math was encouraged and nurtured by her family and by her teachers in Trinidad’s highly regimented British education system. After graduating from the University of the West Indies with a bachelor’s degree in statistics and computer science, she began teaching high school math in Trinidad and loved it.

Abraham came to the U.S. in 1989. In the process of getting her green card, she taught in a Miami-area middle school, Miami-Dade Community College and Florida International University, where she later earned her master’s in mathematics. Abraham also taught at Georgia Southern University, and then at the University of North Florida before landing her “dream job” at Florida Community College in 1999. After her first class here, “I told my husband, I found the job for me.”

“It’s so much easier in a small classroom. I can just look at their eyes and tell if they’re following me. I can call people by name and look over their shoulders. I can pair them up very easily for activities. You can really get into the teaching,” she said.

Besides her awards for teaching excellence and her published textbook for math preparation for the CLAST, Abraham is proud of another success, this one outside the classroom. A ballet and contemporary dancer in her youth, Abraham organized and instructed the Campus of Choice Dancers. The troupe of students performed Caribbean and African dances throughout the city and region and was featured in area newspapers.

It was apparent from an early age that teaching math was in the cards for Rosalie. “If I have a headache one day, I go to my class and the headache is gone,” she smiled. “It’s not just that I am giving to the students. They are giving back to me as well. Teaching is what I live.”

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