02/21/2025
Another letter of reference:
October 10, 2018
Dear Madame or sir :
I am writing to you as a reference for Mr. Doueck (Bobby) as my mathematics tutor as I was transitioning from grammar school into junior high school in the mid 1970s. I was a relatively good student in most respects, but lacked focus and confidence in math. My mother, who worked in the accounting field, became concerned after she was informed at a parent teacher open house that I was falling behind the other students and my teacher was losing patience with the situation. At that time, Bobby lived in my neighborhood and was friendly with my older brother who knew him to be extremely bright and well mannered. He suggested that my mother speak to Bobby about tutoring me in this subject before making any judgments about my cognitive abilities. Bobby began tutoring me in math within days of their conversation.
We were learning about fractions – multiplication, division, and conversion to and from decimals in school at the time. My teacher had little patience for failure or slow problem solving. She frequently called students to the front of the classroom to solve problems on the blackboard and relished the chance to place struggling students alongside high performers as a motivation tactic, I suppose. Suffice it to say, I did not do well under those conditions.
The first thing Bobby did was to sit down and talk with me about what was going on in school and what the environment was like in the classroom. He immediately recognized that I did not lack the ability to solve the problems, but instead, recognized that I was terribly shy and had virtually no self-confidence when it came to working through the problems.
As the weeks turned into several months, I became the best math student in my class. It is hard for me to explain how valuable that experience was for me at that time (43 years ago). It is not hyperbole to suggest that it had a profound impact on me into adulthood. Bobby‘s ability to make math fun (to demystify math), rather than terrifying, to build my confidence by allowing me to succeed while gently correcting my errors turned me into a better student across my entire curriculum. It was so impactful that I can recall it as though it all happened yesterday. Today I am a Managing Director for a fortune 250 company in the financial services industry. I am the head of the real estate equity investment department for my firm with responsibility for billions of dollars of invested assets and management of a team of bright, highly competitive professionals. Critical reasoning and quantitative analysis (math) is an essential part of what we do. As important as quantitative analysis is, it is vastly more important, as a leader of professionals to instill confidence. I learned the importance of that, in part, from Bobby .
Sincerely,
Rob LoCascio 
