Angela Yee
Features Reporter
What is Humans of Newton South? Modeled after Humans of New York, a popular photo blog that photographer Brandon Stanton created in 2010, Humans of Newton South is a chance to capture the untold stories of students and faculty of the Newton South community. Every week, Features has started the initiative to showcase an individual to explore their ‘behind the scenes’ life to display the real people that make up the student body.
This week, the Features Section has chosen to spotlight a Newton South teacher, Mr. Rice.
“My name is Mark Rice, and I’m very passionate about teaching math. I even do it after work, and we have this non-profit called STEM for Everyone. You can volunteer as a math tutor, and you can tutor a METCO student in grades K-8 in Newton Public Schools. It’s such a great way to help these students develop and close the achievement gap. Learning math is awesome! I actually started this four years ago with my daughter. She wanted to teach math at a local library, and I [thought] this was such a great idea; teaching math is awesome. We’ll just play math games with other kids. The first two libraries we went to said this was a great idea, but we couldn’t do it until we filled out all this paperwork. I was so disappointed we had to wait around six months before we got to start. So we just created this charity so you can go straight into volunteering and don’t have to do any of the admin work,” said Mr. Rice.
