Erin Wallace

Erin Wallace is a new chemistry teacher at Brookline High School. In addition to teaching, she loves spending time with her family, traveling, and jogging. She previously worked at a college teaching chemistry and has been a licensed teacher for 20 years. She loves chemistry and works with students to show how chemistry relates to them in their daily lives.

What are some of your favorite hobbies that are not work related?

I love to spend time with my family.   We travel a lot. My husband is Irish so we used to live abroad and some of our favorite hobbies were trying to get away for a long weekend with just a small carry-on bag. We’ve traveled extensively, so that’s something I really enjoyed, trying to go to new places. One of the most memorable places was to Egypt to see the pyramids. I also love to jog,  and I love to play tennis.

What are your favorite activities to do with students?

One of the new things they are doing in chemistry is – with the Next Generation Science Standards – is to make reading more central. So I do enjoy having students read articles to each other in class. For example, last year in my “Chemistry of Food” course we were talking about molecules converting to a gas stage to get to your nose receptors, and about how so much of eating is not just in your mouth —  it’s your nose too. We read an article about coffee, the different roasting stages of coffee from picking them to brewing them, and the different aromas and reactions that were occurring.

Do you have a favorite memory of a time you were either mentored or you mentored someone else?

I enjoyed being mentored last year. I’m a chemist,  and so I worked with a biologist. I was also teaching a forensic chemistry course. I enjoyed being mentored by a biologist because she didn’t know some of the chemistry and it had been a very long time since I had run gels. We were able to work together and she was able to help me run some gels to help us study DNA fingerprinting. I think that we helped each other because she was mentoring me with the science, but the biologist had never really worked with students before.

Is there any advice that you would give to students in general?

I know it sounds very trite, but just don’t sweat the small stuff. Everyone’s going to make mistakes, and it’s through mistakes that you learn. And it’s really hard to make mistakes. If you look at the big picture, making a mistake on a test or not doing well on an assessment, that happens to everybody, not just you. Despite little individual bad things that might happen, you just have to kind of pick yourself up and look at the bigger picture.