When you first walk into Mrs. Tedei’s classroom, you are greeted with colorful posters full of words of encouragement and a cheerful atmosphere. Mrs. Tedei perfectly reflects her posters—she is bright and cheerful and full of encouragement. 

Mrs. Tedei is a teacher who truly cares about the success of her students. She had an open door policy so that students could get help whenever they needed it. She has a quiz retake policy which allows students to retake quizzes as many times as they needed to pass. If you ask any of her former of current students, they would say that allowing retakes is the most helpful aspect of her class. This policy can save grades and make quizzes less stressful. 

In addition to caring about her students’ grades, Mrs. Tedei genuinely wanted to get to know all her students. Every Friday my class would get up from our desks, stand in a circle, and share something about ourselves. The prompts varied from “what’s your favorite movie” to gross “would you rather” questions. Everytime one of my classmates asked in an annoyed tone, “Why do we have to do this?”, Mrs. Tedei would respond that creating a community was very important to her. Even though not all of my peers liked these community circles, I got to know and meet new friends through them. I made more friends in her class than I had in all my other periods combined. My new circle of friends would have a blast doing math scavenger hunts or gallery walks. We would race with each other to finish worksheets, and help each other check our work and solve particularly challenging problems. 

In elementary and middle school, I felt that I was too dense to understand anything about math and developed a deep hatred for it. But I have never loved a subject more and it is all because of Mrs. Tedei. The way she taught Algebra 1 showed me another side to math and I fell in love with it. Solving quadratic equations and graphing lines had never been so fun. Even though I still wasn’t the greatest at it and made mistakes, I knew that if I ran into a problem, I could just ask and Mrs. Tedei would be there ready and willing to help. Thank you Mrs. Tedei for caring so much about your students and being an incredible teacher!