Herscher’s Rebecca Williams enjoys making math easy for students

Herscher High School teacher Rebecca Williams knows how math can be hard for some students. Yet, her fondness for mathematics helps make the pathway to learning for her students much clearer.

“I love math, and I love getting to share my passion for math with the students,” she said. “I just like seeing them grow. That’s the really nice thing about being in a small school like this, as I teach the kids multiple times throughout their high school career. And I interact with them in different clubs throughout their four years.”

Williams sees her students’ confidence grow during that time.

“We have a lot of kids come in and say, ‘Math is not my thing. Math is hard, I don’t like math. It’s my least favorite,’” she said. “And I just like to keep trying to get through to them and show them why it works, how it can be important and how we see it. It gives them that light-bulb moment when it all connects.”

Williams, a 2004 Bradley-Bourbonnais Community High School graduate, went to Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin, to study math with plans to pursue a career in business accounting. But she had her own light-bulb moment.

“I didn’t love some of the classes and the idea of being in an office eight-to-five type of thing, and I just wanted to be around students,“ Williams said. ”I know it sounds silly, but to show them the math, share it with them and help them learn it. And so I changed majors."

She and her sister, Michelle, would pretend they were teachers as kids, so the play-acting worked out in the long run.

“My sister and I both ended up being teachers, even though no one in our family is,” she said.

At 38, Williams began teaching at Herscher alongside colleagues close to her own age, which made the learning curve of teaching much smoother.

“Surprisingly, for the small school, most of my department started within a two- to three-year window, and we’re all still here,” she said. “We work really well together. We were a young group, but I think we’ve just bonded over trying to figure out the best way to teach our students and how to make everything flow so that the kids do well the four years they’re here.”

Williams, who lives in Bourbonnais with her husband, Mark, and their three children, loves teaching in Herscher because of the “great students” and the collaboration among the faculty.

“But what I personally love most is just again, it’s a small school where I really get to know the kids, and I really get the opportunity to kind of see them grow over the four years,” she said.

Herscher High School Principal Brad Elliot said Williams’ lessons are engaging and creative in a subject that students don’t always love. He added she’s also very professional.

“I would describe her as very reliable and you can count on her,” he said. “And I would say both, administration, her peers, students, they can rely on her. She can really connect well, in my opinion, with her students.”

Elliot added that in the classroom, Williams has a knack for recognizing misconceptions that students might have and identifying areas where they’re struggling.

“She knows how to teach, or how to re-teach, or how to support them in multiple different ways,” he said.

Williams teaches mostly algebra I and algebra II, but she also has classes in honors geometry and AP stats. She is the sponsor for Herscher’s SEA Club, which centers around environmental action issues.

“I teach some honors-level kids and some math kids who I really hope can see the big passion of math and will go on to study it,” she said. “But I think my biggest goal is just that every student becomes a little bit more confident than what they were before they walked in my door.”

Williams recognizes that math is structured and courses like calculus are really for those students who want to go into a STEM field.

“Yet, at the same time, there are so many ways you can be creative and think about it differently,” she said. “And so some kids really like that, and others, you know, it’s just a difficult thing to learn.”

Williams’ three kids are also students in the Herscher district. Her son, Ryan, is a junior at the high school; her daughter, Claire, is in seventh grade at Limestone School; and her son, Graham, is in fourth grade at Herscher Intermediate.

Having her kids in the district helps her decide what is best for her students. She’s also had the opportunity to be Ryan’s teacher twice.

Teaching math also helps the students learn their choices, and it answers the often-asked question, “When are we going to use this?”

“The reality is a lot of it you’re not going to use every day, but we let you decide,” Williams said. “You get to this point and then you decide. Do you want to go into a STEM major, do you want to keep doing math and science, or is this the end of the road for that?”