I want to empower all my students to believe in their abilities and to take advantage of opportunities in all areas of their lives, especially math.”
Meg’s Story
A daughter of two teachers, Meg Gildea was raised with the idea that “I could do anything I put my mind to.” In high school, Meg never had a female math or science teacher and was one of only three female students in her high school’s senior math class. Now that she herself is a math teacher, she hopes to be a role model for young women. “I want to inspire girls and all students who assume they are not smart enough to become engineers, doctors or mathematicians.”
Meg credits a high school calculus teacher with giving her first opportunity to teach. She was amazed by this teacher’s ability to “successfully teach many different levels of math.” As she assisted him in a lab class for students struggling with math, she learned to “love the challenge of finding a creative way to describe a concept or problem so that every student understands.”
Meg is a graduate of Lewis and Clark High School in Spokane, Wash., and was both a women’s and gender studies and a math major at the College of the Holy Cross. She taught math at a camp for middle schoolers and at an outpatient drug addiction program, at the Matt Talbot Center in Seattle . She enjoys rock-climbing, running, listening to music and is interested in teaching in an urban environment.