Spokane Falls Community College math instructor retiring after 50 years

Kialynn Glubrecht isn’t particularly excited to leave Spokane Falls Community College, where she has taught math since the school was built five decades ago.

She’ll miss her students, and her small office on the second floor of Building 18, where potted plants hang from the ceiling and trinkets rest on a tall gray filing cabinet. And she’ll especially miss her friends in the math department, whom she thinks of as family.

“It’s hard to leave them,” Glubrecht said in an interview Tuesday, with some of her office belongings piled in boxes on the floor.

At 74, she has grudgingly decided it’s time to retire. This quarter will be her last at SFCC.

It was the job she had always truly wanted, although there were times when she considered becoming an attorney or an accountant, she said.

“It’s almost embarrassing, but when I was a freshman in high school, we had to take some preference tests and ability tests and stuff, and then we had to write an essay on what we wanted to do,” she said. “And I said I wanted to be a math teacher.”

After graduating from Shadle Park High School, Glubrecht earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mathematics from Eastern Washington University. She taught at both of those alma maters, and in Medical Lake, before starting at SFCC in 1967.

She interviewed for the job with the college’s first president, Walter Johnson, and watched as the campus and the students blossomed.

“Having a brand-new school gave us a big sense of cohesion. There was a time when I think I knew every faculty member on campus,” she said. “It created a real sense of community.”

Back then, the campus comprised just eight brick buildings, all in the same architectural style, surrounded by “little tiny trees maybe 5 feet tall,” Glubrecht said.

“It’s really been fun to see it physically grow, and to see a little variety, and particularly to see the trees grow,” she said. “It really makes a difference.”

A few colleagues from the early years remain, but Glubrecht could think of no one who’s taught there as long as she has.

Glubrecht has taught every math course offered at SFCC, from pre-algebra to business calculus, and has rarely missed a day of work – even after she broke her foot while hiking in the Galapagos last year, an injury she described as “an unplanned and unwanted souvenir.”

To help her students learn, she offers a counterintuitive piece of advice.

“I ask them to take fewer notes,” she said. “I think students tend to take notes in lieu of letting the information process through their brains. And I think the processing, the paying attention … is more important than being a stenographer.”

Glubrecht doesn’t buy the notion that some people simply can’t learn math, or that it’s not useful in everyday life. But sometimes, when a student asks, “When will I ever use this?” she responds sarcastically: “To get out of college.”

She’s leaving the school on a high note, having recently won a lifetime achievement award from the Washington Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges. She plans to keep traveling, and reading, and spending time with the three of her four children who live in Spokane.

SFCC, though, will always occupy a special place in her thoughts.

“I do think there’s a real sense of community that extends not just to the faculty, but up to the administration and down to the students,” she said.