I became a teacher because…
When I went to college, I went to be an engineer because when I was I high school, any girls who were good at math and science went to engineering school. I spent all my time tutoring people in the engineering school in physics and calculus, and everybody kept saying you should be a teacher, you should be a teacher, so one day I finally figured it out: I should be a teacher.

Math is the most important subject because…
It is the best. Math helps you see the beauty in the world, helps you describe everything, any patterns. Anything that happens in form and shape and space has to have some have some math behind it. It’s just beautiful.

My favorite quote is…
I don’t live by quotes, but I live by song lyrics. Anything that happens triggers a song that I know and I start singing. I sing about everything. One of the things that I say is “You need to expect great things from yourself. If you are not expecting great things from yourself, who is going to?” Right now—this is going to sound silly, but I like Katy Perry even though people make fun of those who like her—and she has a song called “Firework.” There is part that says “You are a firework and you have to ignite,” and that is my quote. It’s in you and you just have to find the spark.

When I was in high school, I liked to…
Dance. I was  in charge of the dance team in our school. We would perform all over the country and all over the state, and we would win all sorts of competitions. Dancing shows your freedom and your expression and gives you chance to hear music and hear rhythm and hear patterns and make your body match the rhythm and the pattern of the music and just feel good.

Now, I like to…
Ice skate. I am not competitive and I am not good. We have a group of adults that started to skate after the age of 40. We work together as a team, and we compete and do shows. We are not great but we enjoy being together and have a good time. I decided to try ice skating because my daughter is a figure skater, my husband plays hockey, and my son plays hockey. So I was at the ice rink all the time, I decided as long as I was there, I might as well try ice-skating.

My greatest fear is…
I don’t know. I thought about it and thought maybe spiders or bad weather, but none of those is a big deal.

My hero is…
I don’t who that is, but my mom is amazing. I don’t know if I have a hero, but I have a lot of people who are special to me.

The most important life lesson that I learned is…
Not to rush everything, not be in a hurry, don’t wish your days away, don’t forget to live today while you are wishing everything to hurry up. Sometimes I come into class and say “Happy Monday,” and people say what’s happy about Monday and I say, “Be careful because you spend one-seventh of your life on Monday, so if you just decided that Monday is never going to be a good day, then you have just wasted one-seventh of your life.” You just need to make sure to make every day a good day. For example, I finished college very, very fast and I started to teach here at 20, and I don’t know why I hurried, but I should have enjoyed college more. I love teaching here, but I wish I just had slowed down and enjoyed college.

When I stop teaching, I want to…
I can’t imagine stopping teaching. I can’t imagine not being here. I want to stay here all my life, forever and ever. I don’t know what it is going to look like when I am finished, because I can’t imagine not being here. I am not thinking about retirement yet. I’ve been here 27 years already. I taught Mr. Moody and Coach Horrell and Mrs. Stricker’s sister. I even taught Andy Cohen, the producer on Bravo. I’ve been here longer than anybody else in the building.