30 years at dvc NOw she’s done
Professor turned administrator Rachel Westlake retires
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Story and photos by Danny Yoeono fter the spring semester ends, Rachel Westlake will be packing away her office in the administration building. That’ll be books, a fan hanging on the wall, framed family photos, a row of 3D polyhedron origami made by her daughter and a bowl of Dove chocolates. Westlake, a great professor and an even better administrator will be retired by the end of June. Time spent as a math professor, a dean and then vice president of instruction add up to 30 years of service at Diablo Valley College. And it was apparently all part of the plan. Just as the math she taught was finite, Rachel Westlake knew her life was too; not in any ominous, terminal illness way, but in “we all die someday,” kind of way. Westlake’s plan was to retire after 30 years, and if you take this year and subtract the year she was hired in 1988, you’ll see why she was a math professor. Accuracy. Westlake stopped teaching math in 2005 when she became a dean and her Ratemyprofessor page has reviews that reflect that she was an exemplary instructor. Reviews from her last year teaching are like bookends that sing her praises, such as “I had Mrs. Westklake a few times, and for any class that she teaches she is awesome... she makes math fun! Take her classes,” and another that says “Took 2 calculus class with Mrs. Westlake. Simply the best instructor... The only drawback is that the tests might be a little more difficult, but you end up learning something.”
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Before Westlake took a college math class, she was a ballerina who studied ballet since adolescence. She danced professionally for four years, two with Pacific Northwest Ballet, then called Pacific Northwest Dance, in Seattle and two as an apprentice for the San Francisco Ballet. However, her love of dance did not translate to a love of performing. So she dropped out and went to college. At City College in San Francisco, she found she liked math. She transferred to UC Berkeley after, where she got her bachelors and masters. estlake would rate her own experience as a professor highly, no matter which course she was teaching. She has said, “I really enjoyed teaching the whole range of math skills.” In particular she liked the learning communities, or linked classes. These are cross-disciplinary classes that compliment each other like calculus and physics, which makes sense for Westlake who was a physics and math major, but she also loved her basic skills math class that was linked to English. As a professor, Westlake landed herself on the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle when she was honored for teaching excellence by the California Mathematics Council for Community College in 2004. The Chronicle writes, “While teaching annuities in a recent class, she told the students that she was saving for retirement with money that comes out of her paycheck monthly. That means that she has an ‘ordinary annuity’ in which payments are made at the end of each term.”
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