A high school teacher with a Ph.D. in physical chemistry inspired a love of chemistry in Matthew Kelley.
“She looked at me as if I could take on any part of the world with her subject,” he said. “I saw so much of my own potential through her. I was less concerned with the chemistry and more concerned about how I could be the person she saw I could be.”
Kelley, who grew up in Atlanta, attended Morehouse College where he majored in chemistry. He was planning to apply to medical school right away, but realized that he wanted to do more than volunteer on the weekends; he wanted to help his community and kids like himself.
“Life is about picking up as you rise,” he said. “It’s about bringing someone up that ladder with you.”
Starting this year, Kelley is a Teach For America (TFA) corps member teaching high school chemistry. He said he’s already seen progress in his classroom. One student couldn’t add six plus six at the beginning of the year. He worked with her one-on-one and provided her with separate assignments to help her catch up. One day she walked in and saw a complicated assignment for the rest of the class on the chalkboard.
“She pointed to the board and said, ‘I don’t know how to do this, but I want to do this — I want to do what’s on the board,’” he remembered. The student immediately picked up the new skill and now has her hand up with answers in every class.
Kelley said he thinks he’s able to get through to students because they relate to him. “It is really important for me to be the person they could see that they could become,” he said.
Kelley said TFA inspires people like him to play active roles in improving their communities and helping children envision better futures.
“It's going to take a lot of hard work and a very long time,” he said. “But one day every single person in this country, every single scholar, everybody is going to have the access to an excellent education. Everybody's going to have somebody that loves them enough, a teacher that cares about them enough to make them want the education that they're giving.”
