“She’s definitely one of the best teachers I’ve had,” said junior William Lewis when prompted on his thoughts on his AP Chemistry teacher. 

Carol Stutzman was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a city about an hour west of Philadelphia, where she was raised on an orchard that sold strawberries and peaches. Stutzman “grew up without a TV,” and one of her memories from her childhood is going to one of her neighbors’ houses to see the moon landing. She is the fourth of five children, and her mother stayed at home raising them while her father worked as an engineer.

Stutzman “was always a reader,” and she “knew how to read… by the time [she] entered kindergarten.” She attended school in Lancaster, where she began playing the french horn in third grade and continues on today. She “really enjoyed chemistry in highschool,” as it “answered [her] questions about the world.”

“That’s why I majored in chemistry, and why it’s so important,” Stutzman said. “It explains everything.” She attended Pennsylvania State University to receive her bachelors of chemistry and then received medical tech training from the University of Minnesota.

She then met her husband and had her first child.

Meanwhile, Stutzman began working as a med tech and then transitioned to “conferences and train[ing] other people.” After which she worked in a lab with “a group of ophthalmologists…[and] did the medical tech work.” She was also a medical surgical tech during which she was “basically the surgeon’s right-hand person.” For example, during a cataract surgery “[she] would use a handheld… to look at the back of their eyes, or to make sure that there’s nothing that the surgeon still has to do.”

She then received her teaching credentials from a University of Pennsylvania branch campus, and began teaching in her early 30s. Stutzman “hadn’t thought about being a teacher until [she] had children,” because she wanted to have a schedule that aligned more with theirs, and for a few years after each of her children were born she took breaks from teaching to raise them.
Stutzman moved to Virginia approximately twenty years ago for her husband’s work and received her masters in science curriculum and instruction from Virginia Tech. She didn’t teach for a few years after moving here while her kids were young, and then began teaching at WAHS.

When she began teaching, there “used to [be] a lot more paper where you had to store all your stuff… [now] the expectation is so much higher to keep up with all these electronic pieces… [like] websites, email, instant responses, texting.” Throughout her teaching career, the “biggest change [occurred] when [her] own kids bec[ame] teenagers. Because [she could] really see… how frustrating it was for them if, like, a website wasn’t kept up, if a teacher didn’t respond to an email, or if the teacher was unexpectedly absent… so seeing that up close made [her] super responsive.”

While teaching, Stutzman learned about working with teenagers and said “the [emotional] ups and downs are so much bigger…at your age and you have a greater capacity to see nuance… you have to be really careful with every interaction. There’s a fine line between joking… and making the class uncomfortable.” 

“She really explains the reasons why things work…[so] she’s helped me do really well in her class…[and] I’ve also heard [that she] gets really good results on the AP exam, like better than average,” Lewis said.

Out in public, Stutzman is regularly recognized by former students expressing their gratitude for her class, and she has a bulletin board of thank you notes that she’s collected over the years from students. “I’ve been teaching on-and-off for almost 30 years… so I’ve already seen the impacts that I have on people,” she said. “This past summer a student I had in 2016 who I taught honors and AP to and who was also my TA… reached out to me out of the blue for her wedding reception… and she’s getting her PhD in chemistry.”

“She is both hilarious and holds her kids to a high rigor and high expectations,” Jordan Dudley, honors chemistry and animal science teacher, said. “she [also] has practice and experience with different types of instruction… I love learning new things from her.”