Every Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday MinerTV puts out a broadcast and one teacher at the school isn’t fond of it. That teacher is Ms. Wieland. She is one of Bishop Manogue’s math teachers, teaching Algebra II Honors. She stands in front of her students everyday teaching everyone math and she doesn’t like disruption during the first period. On some days there are some interruptions that shorten the learning experience.
Born in Ohio, she moved to Reno when she was five years old and attended Our Lady of Snows and Reno High School. She then got her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Nevada, Reno. She always loved numbers because she grew up around them. Her dad was a CPA, which is a certified public accountant and she believes that mathematics is traced in her DNA and that’s why she loves it so much.
Students love Ms. Wieland, but many students don’t know what she does outside of the school walls. Students would be pleased to find out that she actually has a lot of different interests that don’t involve math. “Outside of school, I like to workout a lot. I like to do needle crafting. I like to travel outside, and I like to work in my yard,” she said. This shows that she is more than just a math genius and a math teacher. Many people would find it shocking that she likes to workout but she finds joy doing it as well as working in her yard. She isn’t doing any yard work right now though because it is the middle of winter. When it comes to her needle crafting she works in embroidery and she does it while watching television.
Wieland also loves traveling. She went to Europe just this summer and had a great time. Here are some photos from her trip. She went to Italy, the Netherlands, France, and more. She also enjoys hanging out with her family. She gets together with them every Sunday and enjoys the time she gets to spend with them.
She loves teaching too, so much so that she doesn’t enjoy when MinerTV takes away from that time. She also doesn’t like when kids in the Broadcast Journalism class come into her classroom and ask her to be on MinerTV. “It’s not that I don’t like it. It’s that I don’t like to be on it, and I don’t like it to go on so long. Especially during the 40 minute classes that are already too short and it goes for ten, fifteen minutes and that really eats up time,” she reveals. She isn’t full of animosity towards MinerTV however. “I like content,” she said, in reference to the videos MinerTV produces every so often.
She is so dedicated to her job as a teacher that every second of teaching that she gets matters and she doesn’t like it when class time is reduced. Her passion for teaching also shows she has a love for her students. When I interviewed her, she reflected on funny stories that have happened to her while she’s been a teacher. I brought up to her that my brother would be in her class next year and she brought up this funny story about a student not wanting to be judged by her sibling. “I’ve had funny situations. This one time I had a student, I guess it was a girl, and she said, ‘Did you know my brother?’ And I said, ‘Yeah I did know him.’ And she said, ‘I am nothing like him. You don’t compare him to me.”
She also reflected on my Algebra II honors class from last year. It was a great class with me and a few of my friends, and I’ll be honest I wasn’t the best behaved in her class but when looking back on it she said, “Yeah, it was a good class. Very good group. It’s sad when you guys leave.” This shows her love for her students even though sometimes the love is undeserving in every possible way.
Ms. Wieland really thinks math is important for every student and doesn’t like when kids think that it isn’t useful in their life. “I like all of the subject. So kids need to learn it because they are going to use it.”
By the time I was finished my conversation with Ms. Wieland, I learned that she is more than just a math teacher that teaches formulas and equations. She is a woman who brings her passion for math into the classroom to make a positive learning environment that helps students learn more and enjoy school more.