Graduate Profile: Ron Towns

For someone just graduating from college, Ron Towns speaks about teaching with a passion beyond his years. “When someone tells you, ‘Thank you for teaching me,’ or ‘Thank you for inspiring me,’” Towns says with an excited look. “There’s just no greater reward that a person can get.”

The Columbia College student’s passion for the down-and-dirty of education shows through in everything he does. Majoring in education and statistics, Towns has received a Fulbright Grant and a Truman Scholarship. The former will sponsor him to go teach in Spain next year, and the latter will fund graduate studies in the future.

Towns plans to make a career as a math teacher before moving up into education policy.

But to a certain extent, teaching is already old hat for Towns. This semester, he student-taught two mathematics classes at a Bronx high school. It was a full-time gig—“staff meetings and all,” as Towns describes it—on top of the two classes he was taking as a student at Columbia. “You learn really fast when you’re doing it,” Towns said. “It was a challenging environment, but one with so many possibilities.”

It’s these challenges and victories that have been pushing Towns further and further into teaching. The algebra class Towns taught was one such example. Most of its 36 students “came to high school academically unprepared,” Towns said. “None of them knew how to add fractions, which is fourth- or fifth-grade math ... but by the end of the year, we were up to trigonometry.”

Columbia has also taught Towns a few things about another one of teaching’s great challenges – paperwork and red tape. “You have to learn to deal with bureaucracy at this school,” Towns said. “I definitely learned a lot of management skills, personal skills.”

Much of Towns’ interest in education was motivated by his own educational experience. Growing up in an all-black neighborhood, Towns went to all-black schools until high school, when he moved on to a more diverse institution. “Detroit has a lot of problems with race and education,” Towns said. “When your neighborhoods are segregated, your schools are going to be segregated too. I saw educational inequity between Detroit and the suburbs when I was growing up—I witnessed it from both sides of the coin. Before I even walked on campus, I knew I wanted to do the education program.”

While he’s enjoyed his time at Columbia, Towns is eager to keep going with his love of teaching. “It [graduation] is going to be bittersweet,” he says, explaining, “I’ve loved it here, but its time to go to the next step.”