She watches them hesitate.
It happens every semester, in every class, with every group of students. The blank stares, the shifting glances, the reluctance to even pick up a pencil. The moment of paralysis before the attempt.
“Most students don’t fail because they’re bad at math,” says Professor Mienie Roberts. “They fail because they’re too scared to even try.”
And so, she waits. She lets them sit in their discomfort. Because she knows that in mathematics—as in life—struggle is not the enemy. It’s the path forward.
“When I walk past your office, I want to see a trashcan full of wrong answers.”
It was advice given to her by a professor years ago, and it’s a philosophy she’s carried ever since. “That stuck with me,” she says. “It changed the way I saw failure. You’re supposed to get it wrong. That’s how you know you’re learning.”
For Roberts, mathematics is about persistence, resilience, and the courage to be wrong over and over again—until, finally, you’re right.
Before she was a professor, before she earned a Ph.D. in mathematics, before she learned to embrace the beauty of failure, Roberts was a child standing before a tiny blackboard in South Africa, lecturing her dolls.
“My grandmother bought me a little blackboard when I was little,” she recalls. “I would line up my dolls and teach them.”
She didn’t yet know that this would become her life’s work. She only knew that she loved explaining things—even if the only audience she had was made of plastic and fabric.
Outside, the world was vast and wild.
Growing up just outside Johannesburg, weekends were spent not in playgrounds, but in game parks, where lions roamed, rhinos grazed, and giraffes towered over the landscape.
“At the time, I thought that was normal everywhere,” she says. “I didn’t realize how unique it was to grow up in a place where you could just drive out and see elephants.”
When asked what home feels like, she doesn’t hesitate.
“I don’t feel like I’m really in South Africa until I’ve seen a giraffe.”
But her path was never meant to stay there.
After earning her master’s degree in mathematics, she moved across the world to Kent, Ohio, where she completed her Ph.D. in Mathematics at Kent State University. From there, she found herself in Texas, teaching at what would eventually become a place that, despite the heat—has come to feel like home.
“It’s not the August weather that makes this place great,” she says with a laugh. “It’s the people.”
Mathematics, for many, is a subject of terror.
Numbers twist. Equations blur. Answers feel impossibly out of reach.
Roberts knows this fear intimately. Because she once felt it too.
“I’ve always struggled with math,” she admits. “It’s always been difficult for me. But at some point, I made peace with the fact that you will always have holes in your knowledge. You will always have to work at it.”
This is the lesson she passes on to her students: Mathematics is not about natural talent. It’s about persistence.
“Some math problems take days to understand,” she says. “You have to sleep over them. You have to be willing to be wrong over and over again before you figure it out.”
She often sees students give up the moment they don’t understand something immediately. But she urges them to stay with the discomfort.
“If you can convince a student to simply attempt a problem, you’re already halfway there,” she said.
Roberts is not interested in simply teaching math. She is constantly rethinking, redesigning, and reimagining how to make abstract concepts tangible. One of her greatest innovations? 3D-printed manipulatives.
“A manipulative is a physical representation of an abstract concept,” she explains. “It’s one thing to see an equation written on a board, but when you can physically move something around, it clicks in a way that formulas alone don’t.”
She took this concept to South Africa, where she and a team designed manipulatives with a 3D printer to explain mathematical series.
“It was incredible,” she says. “We were able to take something deeply theoretical and make it real.”
She hopes to publish a paper on it soon—and maybe even secure a patent.
Roberts is also thinking ahead—beyond chalkboards, beyond traditional classrooms, beyond even human teachers.
“Artificial intelligence in education is here to stay,” she says. “The real question is: How do we adapt without losing what makes learning personal?”
he recently took an AI course to learn how to incorporate machine learning and automation into her teaching. The results?
“This summer, my students built apps in a week—things that used to take an entire semester. That’s the power of AI.”
Even though the AI is dominating conversations and fueling fears in some cases, Roberts is not afraid of technology replacing traditional teaching.
“The professor might become more of a facilitator,” she muses. “And that’s okay—as long as we don’t lose that personal touch.”
For all of her accomplishments—her degrees, her research, her innovations in math education—Roberts doesn’t want to be remembered for any of that. She wants her legacy to be something simpler, deeper, more human.
“I hope that my legacy will be that I made mathematics accessible to all students,” she says. “That I helped them see it in a way that made sense to them.”
More than anything, she hopes her students leave with the belief that they are capable.
“I don’t want my students to fear math. I want them to see it as a puzzle—a puzzle they are completely capable of solving.”
She pauses for a moment, as if searching for the perfect equation to sum it all up. And then, she smiles.
“You don’t have to get it right today. But if you keep trying, eventually, you will.”
And that—more than anything—is the lesson that matters.