Ottawa High’s Ellen Gross builds students’ skills – and confidence

At a young age, Ellen Gross – then Ellen Goetz – already knew her answer to the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“I knew when I was in fifth grade that I wanted to be a math teacher,” Gross said. ”Nothing other than that ever crossed my mind. My mom, Jane, was my teacher that year, and we had a class project. She had us all design a square on a quilt, and then she sewed the quilt together. My square was a teacher’s desk with a chalkboard in the background with a math equation on it."

Gross grew up in Flanagan, and the summer before her junior year of high school, her family moved to Ottawa after her mother was hired as the principal at Jefferson Elementary School. Her dad, Keith, taught history at the high school in Flanagan for his entire career.

“I like math. I knew I wanted to do something with others, and growing up in a family where both parents were educators, I knew a little bit about what the career would be like. My parents were and have always been supportive, they just wanted my siblings and me to find something we’d find fulfillment and happiness in.”

That first year at Ottawa, she said she went to all of the volleyball open gyms in the summer to make new friends with the goal of not having to eat lunch by herself when school started. She played volleyball and basketball for two years and graduated in 1996. She then went to Valparaiso University and graduated in 2000 with a degree in mathematics and secondary education.

She taught one year at Lake Zurich High School and coached freshman volleyball, and one year at La Salle-Peru High School, where she was a varsity volleyball assistant. She coached freshman volleyball at Ottawa for the first five or six years until her children became involved in sports and other activities.

She is currently in her 23rd year as a math teacher at Ottawa.

“I teach primarily freshmen and seniors,” Gross said. “The freshmen are in an Algebra A class, a year one of two of Algebra 1, then I have two sections of what is essentially pre-calculus for the college-bound seniors and, rarely, juniors who are ahead of the game.

“I always want my students to feel safe and to just try in this classroom. If they feel they have an answer, right or wrong, I want them to share it. No one is going to laugh at them in this space.

“My classroom is a safe place to fail. If they fail, we’ll work together to figure out why that happened. My students know that’s how things go in my classes.”

Ellen’s husband, Matt, is an English teacher and has been the Pirates’ boys tennis coach since 2001. Their oldest son, Adam, is a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, while their youngest son Noah is a senior this year at Ottawa and, not surprisingly, a standout on the tennis team.

At the front of Gross’s classroom, above the chalkboard, hangs a sign with a quote from Albert Einstein: “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.“ She said no matter what struggles a student might have had with math in the past, the slate is clean when students enter her classroom for the first time.

Her hope is that she can help students turn their past failures into successes.

“I hope all of my students leave my class with some newfound confidence in their math skills at whatever the level is, and have fun,” Gross said. “A lot of kids find it easy to get down on themselves if they don’t understand something right away or have struggled with math in the past. For the ones who already have that confidence, I want to boost it up, and for the ones who don’t, I want to give them that confidence and start building on it.”

She said there have been so many moments over her teaching career that have made her proud, but just having the opportunity to live out her childhood dream at Ottawa High School is something she’ll always be thankful for.

“I’m proud to be a teacher,” Gross said, “and I’m proud to be a teacher at Ottawa High School.”