Teaching in the B wing on the 3rd floor, Ms. Smith is an English teacher at WHS who has taught for 16 years.  She teaches freshman English and senior seminars: Literary Analysis of Film and Psychology and Literature.  Her favorite class to teach is her freshman class. 

Ms. Smith has always loved English, and if you asked anyone who knew her when she was younger what she would be when she grew up, it would obviously be an English teacher.  However, Ms. Smith didn’t see it at first and, for a while, didn’t want to do the obvious thing. It wasn’t until she was 42 years old that she decided to become a teacher. 

Growing up, Ms. Smith attended school in Westwood, MA, which was “similar to Westborough, but different location,” she shares. Although she wasn’t a part of many extracurricular activities, Ms. Smith enjoyed her academics, specifically English class.  She had a job at the dry cleaners to keep her busy. 

Longing for change and a fresh start after graduating high school, she headed to Ohio, where she attended Marietta College. Ms. Smith loved college; she joined a sorority, many clubs, and the crew team, and her social life flourished. Going into college, Ms. Smith wasn’t sure of what she wanted to do with her future so she took many classes and eventually decided to major in sports medicine, as she wanted something more practical than writing essays. 

After graduating with a degree in sports medicine and never doing anything with it, Ms. Smith moved to Oregon, where she worked at an investment company. On the side, in her free time, Ms. Smith took English classes as a hobby.

She soon realized that the investment job wasn’t a good fit and that she didn’t like the work environment. 

“I wanted a job where my ideas mattered more than at this financial institution, and I wanted to be creative and have an interactive audience and talk about things I really like, which would be English,” Ms. Smith said.

In 2007, Ms. Smith moved back to Massachusetts and began working as a long-term sub for WHS English teacher Mrs. Roney (who was out on maternity leave). Shortly after, Ms. Smith got her first teaching job at WHS and has worked here ever since. 

“My favorite thing about being a teacher is that it’s never boring,” Ms. Smith shares. 

“I can think about it as much or as little as I want; I can switch it up and do different things; students are always different, I like the community and the other teachers.”

In her free time, Ms. Smith enjoys the outdoors. Whether she is walking in the woods with her dog, Hoover, paddleboarding, or biking, she is outside. Ms. Smith is also a part of a group that fun hikes Mt. Wachussett every month in the dark during the full moon. When the weather isn’t nice, Ms. Smith can also be found knitting and watching TV, which makes sense as she does teach a literary analysis of film class. 

When asked what advice she would give to students, Ms. Smith shares, “It’s hard to have the bigger picture when you are younger, because everything seems so important about now.  When you have the bigger picture, you see that you can change anytime, anyway, and you might not be taking the most direct route that you plan, or you think you should, but you still get there, and it won’t matter if you don’t do everything right exactly now.”