In this episode of our interview series, Daisy, dressed as Cinderella this time around, sits down with Ms. Miller in the Purple Computer Lab, robots and all, for a conversation that turns out to be less about one teacher's job and more about an entire family's history with Nysmith.
Ms. Miller's Nysmith story doesn't start in a classroom. It starts on a tour, back when the school was still known around town as "the Chuck E. Cheese building."
"I was so overtaken by everything I saw," she said, remembering the visit. "I pulled my kids out of Montessori school almost immediately." Her daughter Caitlin started first grade at Nysmith in 1995. Her second daughter, Megan, came the same year. Her youngest, Darby, wasn't even born yet, she enrolled as a three-year-old a few years later.
All three kids went all the way through Nysmith. All three graduated. And somewhere along the way, Mrs. Miller went from giving campus tours her own kids took to becoming part of the staff herself, encouraged, she says, by the Head of School's mother, who "always seemed to find the best in people." She started as a substitute just before 2000 and never left. This year marks her 27th anniversary.
It's worth pausing on what happened to those three kids, because it says a lot about what a Nysmith education can lead to.
Caitlin swam for four years at Westfields, went on to UVA, majored in systems engineering, and has worked at Deloitte ever since.
Megan attended Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, interning at NIH in the afternoons during high school. She applied to MIT without telling her parents she was applying, paying the application fee herself. The acceptance letter arrived on Pi Day. She studied biological engineering at MIT, then graduated and promptly taught herself software languages instead. Today she's a Level 5 engineer at Google, working on the Maps team in Seattle.
Darby rowed crew all four years at Westfields and served as team captain her senior year. The Naval Academy recruited her, she service-selected into the Marine Corps, and spent five years stationed in Okinawa, including a nine-month secondary deployment to Australia. She loved Australia enough that when the Marine Corps wouldn't send her back, she found another way: she joined the Australian Air Force instead, and now holds dual citizenship.
Ms. Miller believes she may be the only person at Nysmith who has worked in all four of the school's computer labs over the years. These days, that means robotics and digital graphics in the Purple Lab.
Robotics instruction builds progressively by grade. Fourth graders learn the touch sensor, bumper sensor, and distance sensor. By fifth grade, students add the optical sensor and color sensor to their toolkit. Some students walk in having never touched a robot before. Others are already competing. Ms. Miller teaches both.
"Some come in with no skills at all and they do amazing things," she said. "And some already have skills and want to show us what they can do."
It's not just robots. Students also work in Adobe Photoshop Elements exploring digital graphics, skills that carry forward with them as they move up through the school. "It's all building and compounding," she explained. With two teachers in every classroom, a student who wants to go further always has someone ready to take them there.
Beyond the Purple Lab, Ms. Miller also runs Nysmith's after-school enrichment program, a role that's grown considerably over the years.
Between teacher-led clubs (there are roughly 150 of them) and outside vendor programs she coordinates herself, students have access to martial arts, fencing, chess, Arduino, and more, with new offerings added regularly. Arabic is currently in the works, and it came about the same way several programs have: a parent suggested it.
"If you have any activities your child is doing outside of Nysmith that you think other kids would be interested in, let us know," she said. "That's how Arabic is coming in."
What comes through most in talking with Ms. Miller isn't the robots or the enrichment schedule, it's how personally she takes the relationships she builds with students.
"By the second week of school, the kids know my grandchildren. They know my cats. They've seen my favorite summer vacation," she said. "They're an extension of my own family. My joke is, my kids had to graduate, but I didn't."
Twenty-seven years, three kids who grew up and built remarkable lives of their own, and she's still here, still getting the robots out for the next group of fourth graders discovering what they're capable of.
More stories from the Nysmith community are coming in future episodes of Doodle Caboodle. But nothing tells the story quite like seeing it in person. We invite you to schedule a tour and experience the Nysmith difference for yourself.