Holding an orange felt-tip pen, Jessica Shoup walks around a Middle School classroom full of Charlotte Latin School sixth graders, sometimes projecting her voice so the whole room can hear her, sometimes whispering for a private word with one of her students. With a curious and encouraging tone, she asks the class to define “stimulus” and “response,” and then leads the students into a discussion of how the human body reacts to its environment. “You’re on to something,” she tells one student. “But why might that happen?” Shoup can’t hide her smile: her pleasure in watching her students learn is obvious.

Nevertheless, she says that her most frequently used phrase in the classroom is “I’m not that nice.” She explains, “It’s not that I want them to think that I’m mean, but they come in and ask me for the craziest things. ‘Hey, do you have candy for us?’ No, I’m not that nice. ‘Can we not do the quiz today?’ No, I’m not that nice. Every once in a while, one student will say, ‘But yes you are.’ And the others will say, ‘No, she’s really not.’” Apparently, Shoup is exactly nice enough.

Did science always speak to you?

Yes. I had some really great science teachers who made it hands-on but also relevant to us as students. I went back and forth between going into teaching and going into the medical field, all the way up through my freshman year in college. I decided to go with education because I really like the interaction with students, seeing how excited they get about discovering something for the first time.

Are there some aha moments that come reliably in your classroom and others that it takes more work to elicit?

If we’re discussing something where they can physically see it in front of them, the aha moments come faster. The more abstract concepts, they have to think about it. Weather is challenging for a lot of them because you talk about water evaporating, and the water rising up and forming clouds, and that the clouds are actually liquid water. They think of clouds being way up in the sky: they don’t think of fog as a cloud, so the concept of it being water droplets is difficult for them to understand.

I love when we bring the microscopes out and the students look at things: cells are another idea that’s not easy for them to understand. You can look at pictures of cells and organelles, but when they can actually see the cells inside an onion, it brings it to life for them. I have a collection of slides for them: hair samples from different organisms, some microscopic aquatic organisms, different types of muscle tissue, samples of different body organs, pond water, the letter E from the newspaper.

One of your previous teaching jobs was at a STEAM Academy in Wisconsin. How has that influenced your work here?

It was all project-based learning. It’s a completely different mindset to create the question that you want to answer and create all the steps that you have to go through to answer that question, and it requires a lot of time and space, so it’s difficult to do that in a 45-minute class. When my students were doing water testing this year, it was a mad rush to get to all the different places on campus where we were testing the water and back. I’m hoping that with the new schedule next year, we’ll have some bigger chunks of time and we can try to bring in some of the project-based work.

Do you have a favorite part of the science curriculum?

Body systems, by far. We look at each individual organ system and its functions, but the point is to look at how everything’s interconnected. Sixth graders get grossed out so easily: when they hear me talking about natural everyday functions, their mouths just drop and every year, someone will ask, “Why are you telling us that?”

What’s your administrative role in the Middle School?

I am the Dean of Student Support. The not-so-fun part is handling the discipline, but we want to make sure that students learn from any mistakes they might make along the way. We stress that Middle School is the time to make mistakes, but also the time to learn from them so they don’t make the same ones moving forward. Anything to do with the student life experience falls under my umbrella, like the soft start at the beginning of the year or the celebrations along the way.

What made you want to be both a teacher and an administrator?

I think you get to see more of the student in an administrative role than just inside the classroom — even if it’s the side of them making mistakes. And I think it’s important for administrators to be in the classroom so they can practice what they preach.

Is there an age when students come to terms with the fact that their teachers are human beings?

From my experience, I don’t think they understand that until the later part of Middle School. In sixth grade, when you see students outside of school, their reaction is “What are you doing here?” I think a lot of maturity happens in seventh grade where they understand more about themselves as people and their place in the world, or at least the Middle School world. 

Tell me something that surprised you about Latin when you started working here.

How welcoming everyone was. Other schools I’ve worked at, the first couple of days before school starts, if you’re in your classroom getting stuff ready and somebody walks by, they might wave. Here, every single person that walked by stopped to introduce themselves and to have a conversation.

You grew up in Michigan. What’s the most Michigan thing about you?

I will not say “soda.” It’s still “pop.” And I’ve lived here for over 20 years, and I am still not an ocean person. I like to be able to walk into freshwater up to my neck and look down and still see my toes.

Where do you want your sixth-grade science students to be at the end of the year?

I would love for them to have a really good understanding of what it means to think like a scientist and to problem-solve. When they have a question where they don’t have background knowledge, I want them to be able to use their resources to answer that question, rather than raising their hand and saying “Can you please tell me the answer?”