“I don’t want all my students to go on to become math students, but I would love for my students to be able to say, ‘This is what I learned in Mr. Rubai’s class,’ and be able to apply it to what brings them joy.”

Adnan Rubai had a college professor who saw something in him. When he was a senior at Binghamton University in New York, the professor asked Adnan if he wanted to be a teaching assistant for a calculus class. Those jobs generally go to graduate students, not undergrads.

As he recounts the story in his office, he snaps his fingers. “She put me in front of the class, and that is where I caught the teaching bug,” Adnan said. “I knew I wanted to do more math and to teach.”

As an undergraduate he had a double major, biology and math. Adnan stayed at SUNY Binghamton and earned a master's degree in math. He eventually also earned a master’s in teaching from Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn. Before coming to Loomis Chaffee he taught at Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn, N.Y., a private day school. He also taught at the University School of Nashville, another private day school.

“The best teachers,” Adnan said, “are those who enjoy the subject, are passionate about what that subject area has to teach us but can make an impact using the content side as a tool to get students excited, challenged, and interested in other things.

“I don’t want all my students to go on to become math students, but I would love for my students to be able to say, ‘This is what I learned in Mr. Rubai’s class,’ and be able to apply it to what brings them joy.”

Adnan has found joy in many roles at Loomis. He started as a math teacher, became assistant department head, interim department head when the department head was on sabbatical, associate dean of faculty, and interim dean of faculty for the 2022–23 school year the, again filling in for a colleague on sabbatical.

He is always ready for a challenge.  

“I want to know more,” Adnan said. “Not that I don’t continue to learn as I do the same job, and every year is different, but as I get more skills, I want to apply those skills in a different way, so that is what excites me.”

He laughs. “I guess I have a wanderlust of trying different things.”

Next year he will go back to full-time teaching. He said he stays fresh by continuing to learn new things and collaborating with thoughtful colleagues who push each other.  As he says, if he can see the joy in his students in the classroom, that gives him joy “and allows me to continue to do the hard work that we do.”

Adnan emigrated from Bangladesh shortly before his freshman year in high school and attended to a public school in Brooklyn, N.Y. He had a strong math background in Bangladesh and gravitated toward that subject matter in Brooklyn, in part because of the language barrier he had to overcome.

“In Bangladesh we were taught how to read and write in English, but I had very little experience speaking English before I started high school,” Adnan said. “It took me a while to figure out what the teachers were saying in class and to get comfortable speaking.”

When he thinks of Loomis, he thinks of unlimited opportunities.

“The diversity of ideas that students can explore here through the curriculum is magnificent,” Adnan said. “I’m thinking back to my high school education, and I was fortunate to go to a really good public school, but the breadth of curriculum here is just incredible, as are the discussions students are engaging in.”

Adnan is a New York sports fan, the Yankees being his chosen baseball team. He came to know them in the 1990s when they were on the upswing. So there is one term, as much as he loves numbers, he does not like to hear in regard to a New York team: “mathematically eliminated.”