Mrs. Wheeler is a teacher in the math department at Wheeling Park High School, and she has been teaching since 2012. This year at WPHS, she teaches honors pre-calculus, applied statistics, and AP stats.
Unlike some teachers who have been here at Wheeling Park High School for their entire career, Mrs. Wheeler taught at a few different places before making WPHS her eventual home as a teacher. “I first started my career in Ohio County in 2012. I actually started at Bridge Street Middle School for a very short period of time and then got a position at Warwood Middle School. After a year, I moved to Colorado and taught in an inner city school in Denver for a year. Then I moved back and got hired here at Wheeling Park High School,” said Mrs. Wheeler.
She is also a former student at WPHS, and that is where she found her love for teaching math. “I took AP calculus here as a senior, and I was doing really well. I thought everyone was really understanding what was happening, and I realized about a month in that kids were struggling, so my parents would host study sessions at my house, and then I would help them with calculus,” said Mrs. Wheeler.
Mrs. Wheeler’s classes are comprised of a lot of juniors, and with that comes the SAT. She spends a lot of her curriculum preparing her students for the best SAT scores. “My favorite part of her class is that it prepares us for the SAT,” said junior Brayden Hedges.
One way she prepares her students for the SAT is by showing them how to use Desmos. Desmos is an advanced calculator that can graph and solve problems, and it is a tool that is used during the PSAT and SAT. “Desmos is our favorite tool in math at this point. I think that some teachers think it’s taking away from the math, but I really think that it’s adding to it. It’s awesome to have a tool that you can quickly access to graph a function or to look at any data. I think kids make sense of it because it’s so visual now,” said Mrs. Wheeler.
Many students enjoy the tool just as much as Mrs. Wheeler. “She has made it easier to explain different math concepts by using Desmos to solve real-world problems,” said junior Jaxon Anderson.
Her favorite part of teaching is how hands-on it is, and the impact she can have on students. “Every day is different. For someone like me who has a math brain, I don’t think it’s a secret that I could be doing something else for more money, but a lot of those jobs require you to sit at your desk, work in isolation, and that really isn’t for me. I have different kids all day long and year to year, and it really is those moments where you realize you really are making a difference,” said Mrs. Wheeler.
She will help you remember the subject at hand by always being willing to go over questions in class. Mrs. Wheeler cares for her students a lot, and you can see that with how she is always trying to make her students learn more.
