Central: Where Dreams Come True
“Working in the fields, you do a lot of math. My grandfather made it fun. I teach my students the same way.”
– Carol Mendez ’09
Hometown: Cambridge, Iowa
Majors: Education and Spanish
Study Abroad: Mérida, Mexico
Title: 5th grade Math Teacher
Employer: KIPP Triumph Academy, a free public charter junior high school
City: St. Louis, Missouri
Accomplishments:
- 2017 William T. Kemper Excellence in Teaching Award
- 2017 Missouri Charter Public Schools Teacher of the Year
- Improved her students’ math proficiency by 500 percent
Carol Mendez grew up picking produce in rural Cambridge, Iowa, alongside her parents Martha and Miguel. “Things do not have to be this way if you go to school and work hard,” they told her.
“Despite the lack of their own education they believed so deeply in ours and they were right,” says Mendez. “My parents migrated from Mexico. We came north to do fieldwork in Iowa. We knew 25 words of English between us. We were eager to learn, eager to make friends. I always felt equal.”
“I wanted to go to a small college. Pella was so calming, so beautiful. The ability to get a great education in a compact space just an hour from home seemed ideal. I knew my profs by their first names. They pushed me, but in a different way, because they knew me,” she adds.
Mendez spent a semester at Central’s Mérida, Mexico, program. “It changed my life. I realized there was so much out there in the world to learn.”
Commencement, she says, was “probably the most emotional day in my parents’ life. I’d made their dream come true.”
Now she teaches other kids that they can make it to college from inner-city St. Louis. Teaching math came from her grandfather. “Working in the fields, you do a lot of math. My grandfather made it fun. I teach my students the same way.”
“Carol’s scholars know that every problem matters and that she’s going to stay with them until they get it,” says Elizabeth Valerio, Mendez’s principal. “The learning in her classroom this year increased by over 500 percent.”
“I’d like to take my students to Central. They’ve never been out of the city much less out of the state,” Mendez says. “Central is where you make your dreams come true.”
This web profile was excerpted from “The Unbroken Circle.”