SHREVEPORT – As a math teacher, it’s Melinda Cassel’s job to know numbers.
As the keynote speaker at LSUS’s First-Year Convocation, her message to a theatre full of freshmen at the end of their first week of classes was that they aren’t just another number.
“You aren’t one of thousands, you’re not just a number at LSUS,” said Cassel, who teaches math at LSUS. “You are you, and we respect that.
“We thank you for being you, and for causing us to grow with you.”
Cassel is a champion of student success on the state level as a Louisiana Board of Regents Meauxmentum Scholar, Mindset Meauxtivator, and a course facilitator for Motivating Learners Course.
But she needed a champion of her own before she found her way to a college degree.
Cassel and her siblings were in the foster care system, and she was adopted by a family in her native South Louisiana at nine years old.
Cassel left that home early, scraping by on a small bank salary while starting and raising a family with her then-husband.
But one day at lunch with her adoptive father, she got a gift that set her on her current trajectory.
“My adopted Dad was a compressor mechanic at Texaco in the South Louisiana oil fields and worked 16-18 hour days,” Cassel said. “But he said, ‘Honey, have you ever thought about using the brain God gave you and going to college? Yes I have Daddy, but even as meager as my salary is at the bank, we need it to survive.”
Cassel said her dad came back with a $50,000 check a few months later so she could quit her job and start her college journey.
Starting college in her mid-30s, Cassel found more champions at Nicholls State University.
A business major who developed an affinity for math, two professors encouraged Cassel to consider a career in math education.
“I put a big, red X on that – my plan was to go back to the bank and make them pay me what I was worth,” said Cassel, who added that a bachelor’s degree will assist folks in earning fair pay. “But I called Daddy and told him that I was depressed that I didn’t have any more math classes. Being the soft-spoken man that he was, there was a long pause before he told me, ‘You’re weird, change your major.’”
Cassel’s degree in secondary mathematics lived at her dad’s house until he died.
She started a fruitful career spanning two-and-a-half decades as a high school math teacher before she came to LSUS in 2020, just four years after earning her education master’s degree in curriculum and instruction from LSUS.
“I was a single mom who was a teacher and a soccer mom while working on her master’s degree before I came to LSUS to join the faculty,” Cassel said. “I’ve had quite a journey, different than most of yours I know.
“But that’s the point. Your journey is your journey, make the most of it and enjoy it. We are not victims, we are victors. We are here, maybe with scars inside and out, and by being here, your life will be better. You’ll have a better quality of life because you’re here, and you’re going to make it across that stage in four-plus years.”
Cassel challenged the freshmen to find her at their graduation, and she’ll deliver the same message her father did.
“On a scratch piece of paper with a cardboard backing, my Dad wrote me a little note,” Cassel said. “It said, ‘I knew you could do it.’
“We know you can do it, we believe in you, and you just have to believe in yourself.”
