By Josie Alston ’21
This school year, Ms. Madeline Zimmerman joins the Middle School as a 7th and 8th grade science teacher. She will also be the assistant coach of the Middle School swimming and water polo teams.
Ms. Zimmerman earned her B.S. in Environmental Studies at Yale University with a concentration in Biodiversity and Conservation. Her motivation in pursuing her major was “the passion of others in the major, each class ending with a sense of hope, and a group of people coming together to want to make a world a better place.”
Ms. Zimmerman has been a swimmer since she was five years old and was on Yale’s swimming and diving teams. She studied abroad in Tanzania at the School for Field Studies’ Center for Wildlife Management, worked at a food supply company in Rwanda, and researched conservation efforts of the elephant in Thailand.
When asked why she chose to travel so much, Ms. Zimmerman responded, “I just love immersing myself in new cultures and learning about the world and seeing how different it is from the US.” She thinks it is important to “take away the things that I think are great from those cultures and try to implement them into my life.” From a more environmental perspective, Ms. Zimmerman acknowledges that “environmental challenges can be different throughout the world” and she finds it interesting to see other cultures’ perspectives on these issues.
In her free time, Ms. Zimmerman enjoys working out, taking dance classes, hiking, and spending time with her friends and family. Notably, she climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in 2016.
One of the most interesting things she’s done in her adult life, according to Ms. Zimmerman, was building a model designed to see how climate change would affect elephants’ prime habitats. She found that climate change is actually healthier for the animals and would create a more hospitable environment for them. This instance stands out for her because it was “a glimmer of happiness within the sad topic [of climate change].” Her experience has shaped her as a teacher because “it helps me see that things aren’t always black and white. Even though something could seem bad or something can seem great, you have to always consider that there are other factors that are going on that can change the way that you view something.”
Ms. Zimmerman was quick to share that she loves Pingry because it is such a “diverse and exciting community” where the people are passionate and the faculty and staff are incredibly welcoming. She loves that the students have energy to spare and “every day, I’m doing something new.” She hopes that as a teacher she will be able to share her love for science and encourage her students to have a feeling of wonder and curiosity for the world around them.