In Room 517, one can often find math teacher Mary Lee Carlomagno chatting with students between classes, creating a warm and welcoming atmosphere for them. Students’ math projects are displayed on the walls, alongside robots and other creations they’ve engineered. After 23 years of teaching at Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School (MVRHS), Ms. Carlomagno is preparing now to say goodbye to both this classroom and a career she didn’t originally plan for — but quickly came to love.
Before becoming a teacher, Ms. Carlomagno worked as an electrical engineer. When she moved to Martha’s Vineyard, she continued to work remotely for a while before taking an opportunity to tutor MVRHS students and run the school’s math lab, a place where students could get extra help in math outside their classes. She quickly found that she loved working with students.
There, she tried to teach students to see how math could be an easy class, because you only need to learn an equation once before you’re able to apply it to many problems. “You don’t have to study if you’re going to take a math test. You know how to solve the problems. But if I’m taking a history test and I don’t know the capital of Colombia, I’m not going to figure it out, right? So it just, to me, seems like the easy class. But I know some people definitely don’t feel that way,” she said.
Throughout her time in the MVRHS math department, Ms. Carlomagno has taught a variety of courses including pre-calculus, calculus, financial literacy, and engineering. This year marked her first time teaching honors calculus, which she described as a highlight of her career. “I really wish I would have started that years ago, because I loved teaching it,” she said. “I had to go back and remember everything, but I just found that I really enjoyed working with a small class.”
Outside of the traditional math courses, Ms. Carlomagno has especially enjoyed teaching engineering, where students build and program hands-on projects such as robots, bridges, and cars. She hopes those engineering opportunities continue for students after she retires. “I’m going to try to make sure somebody carries on with it, because I think it’s really important,” she said.
For everyone who knows Ms. Carlomagno, it is clear that the heart of teaching for her is the relationships she has developed along the way. “I just think the experience of teaching has been amazing. To meet so many young people, I think it’s kept me young,” she said.
Senior Abby Horrigan said, “Ms. Carlomagno is one of the sweetest teachers I’ve had the pleasure of having. She’s not only been my teacher this year, but also my friend. I’ve gotten to know so much about her, like hearing about her children, and now her new grandchild.”
Senior Maeve Cook-Martin is a student in her pre-calculus class. “Even if she is having a bad day, she always manages to have a smile on her face,” Maeve said.
Ms. Carlomagno’s parting words of support for her students are validating and encouraging, as always: “I think you guys are enthusiastic, I think you’re caring, and I think you’re going out in a world that’s so much harder than when we were young,” she said.
The connections she’s made are also what makes retirement bittersweet for her. Ms. Carlomagno is excited to begin a new chapter and is looking forward to spending time with her new grandson (born just a month ago), traveling to Alaska, and visiting family in Ohio.
But she is finding that walking away from the classroom is not easy. “I’ll miss it every single day,” she said.