1st Place, Personality Profile
2024-25, Division 2, News Writing
By Lucas Caswell
The Skyline Post Skyline HS
“I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a teacher who cares more about her students than Mrs. Pool,” says student Leland Weiser (‘25). Jennifer Pool, most known for teaching AP Statistics, has become a beloved staple of the Skyline math department since arriving in 2009. Now, she is retiring.
The overwhelming sentiment throughout Skyline is that Pool is beloved and will be missed. “I don’t know a single student that doesn’t like Mrs. Pool,” says student Johan Landis Lewis. “She is a really great part of the Skyline community.”
Her colleagues share that sentiment. “I’m so happy to have just spent time with her,” says Math Teacher Nicholas Bertsos. “She’s just an awesome person and she’s just kind and funny and so insightful.”
Beyond the school she enjoys getting together with friends, especially at her home in Traverse City, Pool has a similar effect on people. “She is just a very giving person,” says Pool’s friend Jennifer Linderman, whom Pool first met over 30 years ago when both were new to Ann Arbor. “She is a lovely, kind, and generous person.”
Shaped by her own challenges with math as an undergraduate, Pool works to make struggling students want to seek help. “She’s always made herself open during lunch and after school,” says student Sophia Nielsen (‘24), “and so it’s been really helpful because I kind of struggle with stats.”
Pool effectively makes students comfortable in her classroom. “She just genuinely seems very concerned about all her students’ well-being,” says Landis Lewis (‘25). “I would feel comfortable talking to her about a lot of things just because of the sort of atmosphere that she creates.”
At the onset of the 2023-24 school year, Pool made preparations for her retirement by giving one AP Stats hour to Bertsos. “[This is] a really good chance to learn from her how she teaches it, because, obviously, she has to be really good at it at this point,’” says Bertsos.
Pool grew up in Flint, Michigan. “My parents went to every single concert I was ever in,” says Pool. The importance of education “was always stressed, and I never questioned that I would go to college.”
Pool then enrolled at Michigan State University to become a math teacher. “I was taking the math classes and doing just fine until I got to the 400-level math classes, and I wasn’t mature enough as a student to really buckle down and put in the work needed to pass those, so I dropped [them].”
Because of this, Pool explored other careers, something her mother supported. “She actually didn’t encourage me to go into teaching. She felt like, when she was a young woman, that her options were teaching or being a nurse, and she wanted me to have other options.”
Pool pivoted to packaging engineering. She graduated in 1986 and accepted a position at General Motors. Thanks in part to a business degree she earned in the evenings, Pool managed to work her way up to be supervisor of about 14 engineers. “Here I am, 29 years old and I’m the supervisor of people who are in their 40s and 50s,” says Pool. “I was at the right place at the right time and had the right set of talents.”
She took leave to have her first son shortly after her promotion. Once returning, Pool found her demanding hours incompatible with parenting. “I literally saw him for less than an hour a day,” says Pool. “So after about seven months of back to work, I said ‘I can’t do this anymore,’ because I started to question why I had a child if I never saw him.”
Pool stayed home with her family, which grew to three sons, for 13 years. When her youngest son began school, Pool returned to earn a teaching certificate from Eastern Michigan University. “I
started off really slow and then I started going more and more as my confidence grew. [I thought] ‘OK, I can do this college thing again. I haven’t done it a long time, but it’s not bad.’”
Pool student-taught at Saline High School. “She was very poised…different than the other student teachers… who were younger and more first-career oriented…” says Pool’s supervising teacher Pete Loveland. “She was ambitious and wanted to gain more experience and went right to Washtenaw Community College and taught.”
After spending time substitute teaching, Pool was hired to teach at Pioneer, and soon after transferred to the year-old Skyline. “Jennifer was a key staff hire as Skyline was expanding,” says former Math Lead Teacher Dan Neaton. “She was brilliant, flexible, [and] empathetic.”
In 2012, Neaton asked Pool to teach AP Statistics. Now, Pool is an AP Statistics veteran. “[What makes her successful is] her understanding of the material, because it is complex,” says Bertsos, “She understands where students’ minds are going to trip.”
Pool is unsure what she will do in retirement. “I want to maybe volunteer in schools, or maybe sub when I’m back in Ann Arbor, or tutor,” says Pool. “Definitely read, travel, work out, see friends, [and] play lots of those New York Times games to keep my brain active.”
NW-15. Personality Profile
The personality profile captures the life, interests, accomplishments of well-known or interesting people, based on interviews from multiple sources. The subject(s) should have experiences, thoughts and accomplishments worth reporting. Anecdotes add to the personality profile. Submit a PDF of the print page(s) on which the story was published or the URL to the story on an online news site.
JUDGING CRITERIA
- Lead captures attention, arouses curiosity; reason for sketch is made clear early in story
- Emphasizes fresh angle; individualizes person
- Colorful, lively presentation; effective form/style
- Descriptive writing demonstrates the concept of “show, don’t tell”
- Reflects adequate research, sound interviewing techniques from a variety of sources
- Avoids encyclopedic listing of subject’s accomplishments
- Effective use of quotes
- Interesting; appeals to the emotions
- Proper diction/grammar