Lunch with Collier
A bomb outside the classroom door was the first sign that Jennifer Collier, math teacher, had been bestowed with a curse. It was in a backpack, sitting just outside the BITA classroom, and her class was soon evacuated. Although it turned out to be a hoax, Collier knew that the curse was only beginning.
Then there was the fire. A few years after the bomb scare, the bitter scent of smoke seeped through a wall of her classroom. At first, Collier thought her coughing students were just being dramatic. But denial soon turned into alarm when she too smelled the thick smoke, growing stronger. And although Bob Parish, assistant principal, told her not to leave the classroom, eventually the smell became unbearable. And like a daring hero, Collier evacuated her room anyway.
When the firefighters arrived, they discovered a fire had been burning the very wall she was teaching on and so they knocked it down, flooding the classroom. They also discovered that the culprit was a cigarette left in the vent from the nearby boys’ bathroom, but again, Collier knew the curse had come to strike again.
Collier soon moved to a different classroom, this time protected within the newly-renovated hallways of the New Building. And near the front of her desk, there lies a hole in the wall patched up with a darker-shaded mesh. Only three years ago, the water from the Foods classroom upstairs had somehow leaked, and for nearly a month Collier would “swear [she] felt a drip on her head”. Then one day as her student teacher was teaching the class, a student told Collier that her feet and her backpack were soaking wet. Then she saw water streaming down the wall. And behind what is now a patched-up hole today was a water bubble which could burst at the slightest touch — and it did.
But despite “the curse that follows [her] wherever [she] goes”, Collier could never stay away from her true passion: teaching math.
“Anyone who’s ever had my class knows that I get excited over the topics I teach,” Collier said. “I try to make math come to life and get kids really engaged in it. Anybody in my calculus and Algebra 2 classes will know that I’m very sarcastic, so if a kid makes a fool of themselves, I’ll totally run with it and I’ll integrate it into the teaching and constantly pick on them about that topic so they’ll never get it wrong again.”
Collier’s love for teaching math stems from her days as an engineer, where she would sit in a cubicle, coding on a computer all day. Collier earned her degree in electrical engineering from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in 2002, but when she graduated (one of the few girls in her class of 200 graduates), it was hard to find a job due to the dotcom bubble burst, the speculative “bubble” created during the Internet boom in the late ’90s and early 2000s. At first, Collier wanted to be a sales engineer, but when she couldn’t get a job doing that, she saw teaching as a perfect combination of interacting with people and math.
“Anyone who’s ever had my class knows that I get excited over the topics I teach,” Collier said. “I try to make math come to life and get kids really engaged in it.”
With a teaching degree from Cal State Fullerton, Collier has been teaching for 12 years. She draws inspiration from her colleagues Andrea Ramos and Amy Welch, science teachers.
“Just knowing how they are, they’re so passionate about their subject, and they like to bring ‘outside things’,” Collier said. “It’s really hard to find ‘outside things’ for math so this summer I’m going to a training to see if I can make calculus come to life more and see if I can get some outside influence. Mrs. Ramos goes on those field trips to learn about the environment and Ms. Welch does all these experiments after school to really bring biology to life, and I want to make that change to calculus and make it less boring for kids, make it less blah. I want to really make a change, so they definitely inspire me to keep bettering myself and my teaching.”
Collier’s colleagues at school play an influential role in her life, especially her exercise group, which consists of special education teacher Samantha Greiner and Skills for Success teachers Kara Dietz and Jessica Dombrowski. Along with Collier, the group is currently training for a half marathon in May. But since it’s “increasingly hard” to find a two-hour slot of training in all of the their schedules, the teachers prepare individually. Occasionally, Collier and Dietz will run during sixth period together, but for the most part, Collier clocks in her miles at 4:30 a.m. every morning.
“On a typical day, I’ll get up early to run at 4 a.m., come home at 6 a.m., get ready, get my kids ready, drop my kids off at school, and then come here,” Collier said. “Today I have a Department Chair meeting, a Brea Olinda Teachers Association meeting, and then I have to get my son to baseball practice. I come home, cook dinner, make sure my kids do their homework, and then at 8 p.m. I finally get to relax for an hour or so and then I go to bed. It’s a crazy day.”
Collier attributes her greatest accomplishment to her children. Her son turned 4 years old in April, and her daughter, 6, has been singing the quadratic formula song since she was 3. “I used to show that to my students and I’d be like, if my daughter can memorize the quadratic formula, then you can too,” she laughed.
A t BOHS, Collier is also known for collecting an “insane amount” of cans for the annual Canned Food Drive. Nicknaming herself the “crazy can collector”, Collier’s competitive side shines through as she wins the title of most collected cans almost every year.
One year, during the Canned Food Drive, Collier experienced an incident with the piles of boxes stacked across her room. “So I like to teach with my hands and walk and talk and get excited over the math as much as I can. And that day, I totally tripped and fell and ate it and I ended up needing Ken the trainer to come, because I twisted my ankle and ended up going to the doctor and my ankle by the end of the day was swollen so bad that I couldn’t even get my boot on.”
Most people would be embarrassed if they tripped and fell in front of 30 students. But Collier took it with pride and laughter. “I’ve always been clumsy, so if I was embarrassed by every time I tripped and fell that would be a lot of times,” she joked.
At the heart of Collier’s attitude on life, however, is a cornerstone of joy and good intentions. Sarcastic but sensitive, opinionated but open-minded, Collier is not afraid to speak her thoughts and fight for what’s fair. And no classroom curse in the world could stop her from opening her students’ minds to the world of math.
