Susan Strickland’s office is filled with toys and puzzles, including several Rubik’s cubes, the kind of brain-teasing exercises that keep the mind limber. It’s a glimpse into the fun-loving side of Strickland, a math professor at the Leonardtown Campus and the 2011 winner of the College of Southern Maryland’s Faculty Excellence Award.

“I like things that make you go ‘hmmm,” she said. However, there’s a larger cube with an extra row of tiles that she admits she hasn’t solved. “Haven’t been able to do the big one,” she said. “But I’m working on it. I’ll get there.”

Strickland, 54, likes a challenge, and she has devoted her 28-year teaching career, including the last decade at CSM, to helping students figure out everything from algebra and geometry to advanced calculus, and she will be among this year’s presenters at the college’s annual Women and Math conference on Oct. 15. Her outlook on math defines how she approaches the subject.

“I think math is beautiful,” Strickland said, recalling a college class in which her instructor asked students to define math in one word. “People were writing things like ‘rigorous’ and ‘exact’ and ‘precise’… very harsh words to me. I had written ‘beautiful.’ People in the class made fun of me for that.”

Strickland says that there is a lot of “cool stuff” in math to enjoy: being able to describe the shapes of things in geometry, the visual aspect of calculus. But what Strickland enjoys most is teaching others how to teach, drawing on her experience in which she calls herself the product of “some really good teachers and some really bad ones.”

The teachers that didn’t impress Strickland were the ones that stood at the board and copied notes from the textbook. “The really good teachers connected the learning to the things we had learned before,” Strickland said. 

In Strickland’s Math for Future Teachers classes, she often uses manipulatives, concrete objects such as blocks or puzzle pieces to remind instructors about the basics. “A lot of people at that level look at arithmetic as something formulaic and they have to get back to thinking about it as something concrete if they are going to teach it to someone who doesn’t know anything about it at all.”

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