About Me

Hi everyone!  I am Mrs. Steele, the Gifted Resource Teacher.  I have been teaching gifted education for the past ten years, and I love my job!  When teaching gifted students, my goal is to enrich students' learning in content and provide social and emotional support.  My hope for my gifted students is that they get excited about trying new things, they don’t worry so much about failure, and that they rise up to their potential.

In my classroom, I try not to ask kids what they want to be when they grow up, but instead ask them what problem they want to solve when they grow up.  This question leads right into our themes for TAG this year.  For grades K-3, our theme is “What can I do to help myself and my peers.”  For grades 4-5 our theme is “What can I do to help my school and my community”. I can’t wait to start!

As for a little more about myself, I grew up in Colorado and went to college in California.  I got my BS in chemical engineering from UCSB, and worked as an environmental engineer for both Norfolk Southern Railroad and a consulting firm before making the switch to be an educator.  My family and I are a bunch of nerds. We love watching Star Wars, and Marvel movies, and playing board games (our current favorite is Terraforming Mars).   My husband is also an engineer turned educator – He was a nuclear engineer and now he teaches at Central Virginia Governors School (CVGS).  My oldest daughter went to Yale and majored in mechanical engineering.  My youngest daughter is attending college in New York City!  She also runs GO! STEM in the summer, a girls-only STEM camp.  We love our three kitties and spoil them rotten.  

My favorite things to do are to travel and spend time outdoors hiking and kayaking. In fact, my family and I have traveled to more than 21 different countries.  This summer we spent 3 weeks traveling through Argentina.  It was wonderful!  Another interesting trip I took was when I went to China a few summers ago to teach gifted students there.  A few of my favorite trips include kayaking with Orcas in Canada, traveling to South Africa where we stayed in the national park system and saw every animal from the Lion King out in the wild, Nepal, where we did a three-day trek around the mountains near Kathmandu, and Morocco where we soaked in the culture and rode camels.