After graduating from McCallum in 2011, Antoinette Matthews has returned to her alma mater as a first-year high school teacher and joined the science department teaching on-level and advanced chemistry. For the past 10 years, Matthews has been teaching all subjects to elementary school students and instructing at summer camps. After teaching at an exclusively STEM summer camp for elementary schoolers, however, she decided she missed teaching science.

“Originally, teaching was not my first goal,” Matthews said. “I was studying opera, which I love, and I still do music, I just do it for fun now. But one summer, I went to work at a summer camp, and I fell in love with teaching little kids and that idea of discovery and exploring the things around us. I changed things entirely, and I got my degree in early childhood education and child psychology.”

Although she and her students are now settled into the school year, Matthews initially had to teach the first month of school digitally to take care of her new infant at home. With a substitute in her place in the classroom, Matthews and her students had to overcome the challenge of teaching and learning a new subject entirely online.

“With the late start, I felt like there was a different type of challenge to it,” Matthews said. “I was more available to answer individual questions in my email compared to these days where getting to emails is harder because I’m not as readily available. However, at the same time, I wasn’t in the classroom to immediately correct misconceptions as they were happening, so there were like two different challenges happening there.”

Having done student teaching with science teachers Robert Ely and Nicole Sorto, Matthews has already had a lot of experience working at McCallum. Even with the late start, the science department was able to prepare her with everything she needed by sharing assignments and material, and managing BLEND while she was unable to.

“[Matthews] has had a big setback having been out that first month because she wasn’t able to establish the norms and expectations that every teacher does the first few weeks of school,” Ely said, “but I peek into her classroom from time to time, and she’s doing great; there’s a huge amount of potential there and although the first year is gonna be tough, she’s gonna do wonderful.”

Her students appreciate having her back in the classroom as well. While she was away, and sometimes still now, BLEND restricted Matthews from accessing the course and grading work, so many assignments that were previously submitted were lost. Having to manage this digitally was tough, but now she is available to work through these challenges in person with her students.

“She’s good at answering questions and helping you walk through anything that confuses you,” sophomore Emily Knight said. “It was hard to not have someone there to work through the assignments with us, so at times it felt like we were teaching ourselves. Now, I like that she gives us time to work on our assignments in class while we can still get help from her.”

For Matthews, coming back in person to teach has been filled with excitement while at the same time, exhaustion. She’s eager to be in a chemistry classroom with highschoolers now compared to elementary students especially because of the immersive experiments and new tools available. Finding a balance between her home life and school work, however, has taken up most of her time.

“It has been very challenging balancing it all, honestly, I think the thing I miss most is sleep,” Matthews said. “Sleep comes when it can, so I think that’s currently the biggest challenge but I don’t think I would change it for anything. I am loving where I am in life right now, I love being a mom, and I love that I am in a high school classroom again. To have the ability to be here and not have to put it on hold because I have kids is really special.”

Her peers in the science department agree that they have all worked through the challenges of online teaching while still preparing Matthews and her students for a successful year of chemistry.

“[Matthews] has a really great attitude and she just generally loves science,” Ely said. “She just overall has a lot to offer to the department.”