People

Carlette Blackmon

Retired Lecturer

Starting year at UNCG: 1996
Ending year at UNCG: 2011

Education

Degree(s): M.Ed. in Mathematics, UNCG (1996)

Brief Biography

Carlette Blackmon taught at UNCG for 15 years from 1996 until she retired in 2011.

Carlette graduated from Eastern Alamance High School in Mebane, NC in 1963, and attended UNCG for two years before transferring to UNC Chapel Hill. She graduated with the AB in Mathematics Education in 1967 from Chapel Hill, and taught high school mathematics in Burlington for five years. Around 1982 her family moved to Georgia, and Carlette took the position of Chair of the Mathematics and Computer Science Department at St. Andrew School (K-12) in Savannah, GA. When her family moved back to Burlington around 1989, she did not immediately seek employment, but she tutored students from Eastern Guilford and Burlington High Schools. After a few years, the tutoring load became almost a full time job. At that point Carlette decided to look into college level teaching. She inquired at Elon College about job opportunities and was told that as soon as she had a master’s degree, she had a job waiting for her at Elon. She decided in 1993 to seek a master’s degree in math and go from there to teaching at the college level. She came to UNCG master’s program and graduated with a master’s degree in 1996.

The story of how she came to teach at UNCG has an interesting twist. The interview at Elon College gave her the added incentive to seek a master’s degree, which she completed in 1996. A few days after graduation, the UNCG math department contacted her with the offer of a part time job. Carlette accepted the offer, and remained employed at UNCG in part time and full time roles until she retired. Unfortunately Elon was robbed of a top quality instructor.

Her colleagues agree that Carlette was loved by most of her students. Her office was usually full of students with more waiting in the hallway. She would worry aloud about students whose grades were below where she thought they should be. Carlette worked hard on her courses, often typing lecture notes and distributing them to her class. She enthusiastically adopted innovations in teaching as the came along such as calculators and later computer software modules that nowadays complement textbooks.