Katherine Beckley is an informal and formal geometry teacher at GEHS. Although she is a geometry teacher now, she hasn’t always been. 

“This is my first year [at GEHS]. It’s great,”  Beckley said. 

In every job, there are hard and easy parts. Beckley has a few things to say about the not-so-easy parts of being a math teacher. 

“Kids hate math. Also, it’s just conceptually some of the topics we talk about are hard for this grade level to wrap their brains around,” Beckley said. 

Now, for the better parts of teaching math.

“The most rewarding part is,  I like to see the kids progress… I still have a picture of my first class…and I’m still in contact with a lot of those kids,” Beckley said.

While this is her first year teaching at GEHS, she has previously taught at another school. 

 “Last year I taught seventh-grade math which was fabulous because it’s one of the most important times of math, what you learn in seventh grade. That was pretty awesome,” Beckley said.  

Teaching math takes more work than some other subjects. Keeping kids interested takes some effort.

“I grade a lot of papers…and we do a lot of Blookets and Kahoots,”

It’s not all bad. Teaching can be an incredibly rewarding profession, especially something so important for young people to learn.

“My favorite is when I have kids in my class who are like ‘I hate everything, I can’t do that, I can’t do that, I can’t do anything’ and by the end of the school year, they’re like ‘Mrs. Beckley, I got a B.’ So, watching that growth,” Beckley said. 

Although she is now, it was not Beckley’s original plan to become a math teacher.

“I wanted to be …  a princess for a long time, but I wanted to be a professional performer whether that be a color guard for DCI, (Drum Corps International) or dance or singing…All the way up until my freshman year of high school,” Beckley said.