Teaching can be a rewarding career choice. Along with being able to impact the next generation, you can also watch your individual students as they grow as a person. Traci Richardson-McVicker is a teacher at Stillwater High School. For her, one of the joys of teaching is when students challenge themselves.
“I love seeing students have ‘ah ha’ moments and helping them think through how our world works,” she said. “I know they don’t love it as much as I do, but I love how much we still don’t know about life. I love it when students start asking things like, ‘I wonder why this happens…’ or ‘What do you think would happen if we did this instead?’”
Traci is in her tenth year teaching at Stillwater. This year, she is teaching AP Biology, AP Environmental Science, and Human Anatomy and Physiology. Before coming to Stillwater, she taught for two years at Ripley High School and three years at Perry High School.
Getting her first taste of teaching in college, Richardson-McVicker says that she was hooked and knew what she wanted to do with her life.
“I was an undergraduate teaching assistant for introductory biology labs at Oklahoma State University during my senior year,” she stated. “I fell in love with teaching that first semester and decided pretty quickly that I wanted to teach biology after I graduated. I started a masters program in Science Education as soon as I finished my bachelors degree, and I started teaching high school science in 2009.”
Throughout her career, Traci has been given many pieces of advice that has helped her along the way.
“The best piece of advice that I have received was to ask questions,” she said. “And answer their questions, with questions. When I started teaching at OSU, our training was based in inquiry learning. Figuring out how to facilitate student learning by asking them questions, instead of just giving them the answer or telling them where to find it, has been the best advice for teaching science, probably in my entire career.”
When she is not teaching, Traci enjoys spending time with her husband, Chris, and her two incredible stepdaughters, Sophia and Emma.
