Outstanding Educator: Mater Dei teacher loves 'energy' of high school

After leaving the collegiate world of teaching and research to raise her three daughters, Donna Richardson couldn’t shake the urge to teach high school kids.

For a while, she resisted.

“It kept coming up,” she admitted.

When her youngest daughter went to kindergarten, she stepped back into a high school for the first time after nearly 30 years; and she immediately fell in love.

“The energy, you’ve constantly got kids who are figuring something out, and they get excited. And it makes me excited and it’s neat,” she said. “I got hooked and decided I’d go back to school – again – to get my teaching license.”

Richardson has been a high school teacher for 11 years, with all but six months spent at Mater Dei High School teaching statistics and physics.

She admitted others may not agree, physics is fun.

“You get to play with toys,” she said. “I like physics because it’s tangible. You can get out a ball, or a toy, and kind of see it happening. … We can do experiments.”

Mater Dei President Timothy Dickel is pleased with Richardson’s drive to develop new labs and hands-on activities to help students grasp difficult physics topics. And when it comes to statistics, Dickel said, she incorporates statistical analysis of a common issue students may experience.

“She is able to really create those real-life situations for them to study and apply the content to,” he said.

Richardson’s goal is to see the “lightbulb turn on” for students.

“The expression on their face that says: I’m getting it,” she said. “I just love that feeling. … There are few things I like more than to see the light of understanding dawn in a student's eyes.”

Dickel is always impressed with Richardson for her willingness to try new things to provide better experiences for students.

Like two years ago, he said, when she created Mater Dei’s robotics team.

“She is always learning,” Dickel said. “And she is always looking for new ways to teach students and engage students.”

Richardson is thankful for Mater Dei’s supportive administration and her coworkers.

“You know they’re behind you,” she said.

Students may not develop the same passion for physics or math that Richardson has, but she hopes they walk away with one thing: to be better prepared for life.

Whether someone is filing taxes, working as an engineer or writing a book, Richardson said the ability to take a big problem and break it down into smaller parts, even if you aren’t sure exactly how to reach the end, is immeasurable.

“I want them to leave with the sense that they can look at a problem that’s overwhelming, break it down into little parts, work what they know and as they do those little things the next step becomes clearer,” she said. “They can do a whole lot more than they think they can do, when they’re faced with this overwhelming part of the problem. … If they can apply that, they will use it the rest of their lives.”