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In Career Defined by Variety, Melissa Mack’s Devotion to Kids Remains Unchanged

By Dylan Howlett

8-minute read

The art of sumo is, at first glance, nothing more than formidable strength. But the task of eluding, and overcoming, an immense obstacle demands more. Flexibility. Agility. A willingness to change approaches with speed and gumption. It is not dissimilar to teaching, nor is it dissimilar to teaching middle school. And it is not surprising that when the Middle Schoolers in Melissa Mack’s robotics After-School Enrichment class clamored for a form of mechanical martial arts, she made it happen. She would make sure that sumo robots could wrestle on a Tuesday afternoon at Durham Academy.

The robotic combatants would, of course, need a ring. Karl Schaefer, the longtime Middle School STEAM teacher and Middle School computer science academic leader, has fielded the same sumo-related requests. He eventually fashioned a sumo ring out of a decommissioned whiteboard, which now rests in the back of the STEAM supply closet in the Gateway Center. The students in the robotics After-School Enrichment class — which Mack started in the 2024–2025 school year — would need something more robust, and enduring, for mechanized wrestling matches. And so Mack found a way.

Her first foray into teaching came in high school, when she served as a lifeguard and swim instructor at a pool in the western Chicago suburb of Wheaton. She loved kids, and she had a genetic predisposition: Three of her aunts were teachers, and her mom has taught sewing and craft classes. Mack thought she would become a pediatrician until she led those aquatic lessons with young kids, who were inclined to cry and thrash and kick about. She would coax them to do the things that they didn’t want to do. And they invariably did them. Mack’s boss noticed the same tendencies. You’re really good at this, her boss said. “That was when I decided I wanted to be a teacher,” Mack said.

She grew up in the small town of Lisle, Illinois, nestled — with no shortage of professional foreshadowing for Mack — in the technology and research corridor of Illinois. Most developing teachers in the state chose elementary education. Certification for middle grades wasn’t even offered. Mack thought she would teach kindergarten, and she attended the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to study elementary education. But along the way, she enrolled in extra classes for middle school instruction — math, science, social studies, language arts, as well as computer science and statistics courses — just in case it would prove helpful. She has taught middle school ever since. After her fourth year in the classroom, Mack grew worried about the preponderance of literacy challenges among her students. She earned her master’s degree and became a certified reading specialist to equip her students with more strategies. When she felt the need to grow in her craft and flex a little more autonomy, Mack moved to China for three years to teach at the International School of Beijing, where she leaned into project-based learning and greater academic ownership among students.

She brought the same whatever-it-takes aplomb to DA, where Mack recently began her 10th year at the Middle School. She has distinguished herself during her time on Academy Road as the most hyphenated of multihyphenates. Mack has taught science, social studies, language arts and STEAM — her full-time teaching load now constitutes solely STEAM courses. She oversees the Middle School’s use of instructional technology, and the division’s forward-thinking strategy, in her role as digital learning coordinator. She is a member of the Academic Administrative Team, and she leads the Tech and Learning Team. 

Mack once advised the Middle School Student Council and was instrumental in conversations around, and in planning for, the division’s transition to Competency-Based Learning (CBL). She is the undisputed guru of — and on-campus support person for — Toddle, the learning management system that Middle School educators use to assign work and share feedback with students. And now in the afternoons, before her rush-hour drive to her home in Raleigh, she runs the robotics After-School Enrichment class. “I think that I’ve always been a person who likes change and variety in what I’m doing professionally,” Mack said.

Robo-sumo might just be the mother of variety. On the second weekend of November, Mack and her sister Meghan bought some plywood from Lowe’s. They had the board sawed into an octagon, and they screwed a sturdy wooden base into its underside to elevate the platform atop a flat surface. The sisters included the requisite engineering gauntlet for sumo robots: They added a black trim to the edge of the ring, which challenges students to code distance and color sensors that ensure their machines won’t tumble off the edges. They hoisted the ring into the back of her car, and Mack delivered it to the Middle School on Monday in time for Tuesday’s sumo wars. It was worth the effort.

Students cheered and shouted as their robots lurched and jostled and rammed their way across the white plywood that their teacher and her sister had fastidiously built two weekends before. Mack checked in with each of her fifth and sixth graders in the class to provide counsel on coding, design, building and troubleshooting. “This whole thing is about taking risks!” Mack said to her students. She smiled as the various pairings grappled with perfecting their sensors and programming their robot’s exact sumo-like movements, and she knelt on the floor when needed to spot-check lines of code. Whatever it takes for kids.

“One of the things that has never changed — and one of the things that has always been so important in this community — is the learner,” Mack says. “It has always been that kids in our community are at the heart of everything that we do and all of the decisions.” Including, and especially, the unparalleled joy of sumo robots.

Mack spoke more about her student-first mindset in an extended interview. She also discussed her time in China; her affinity for North Carolina state parks; and her love and admiration for the people of Durham Academy.

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The following conversation has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

DA: What was it like teaching sixth grade math and science in China?

Mack: “I think it was recentering for me to think about my practice, and I think that was really empowering for me when I was there. We went through a couple of years where we were doing a lot with project-based learning. A lot of their curriculum was going to be project-based, and we were kind of doing more pieces of that in our classrooms. In that window, I was like, ‘This is what I love most about teaching.’ You’re guiding kids to figure things out on their own. It’s not so much that we’re all traveling through the same curriculum at the same pace at the same time. Kids are challenged. They’re working through problems — authentic things to actually go through and learn. I loved that aspect of it, and it really changed me as an educator.

“After three years, I was ready to leave China. I loved the school I was at, but I was ready to be closer to family. I think there’s a lot of different things about living in China that make it challenging. I loved a lot of things. I think I was tired of gray skies and pollution, and I was just ready to be closer and kind of switch it up.”

DA: You returned to Illinois and taught middle school for a year. What prompted you to look southeastward to North Carolina and DA?

Mack: “I have three siblings — a brother and two sisters — and my brother, who now lives in Durham, lived in Raleigh at the time. My aunt and uncle and their kids also lived in Raleigh. I was like, ‘Well, maybe I’d like North Carolina for a bit.’ I started looking, and DA had a one-year sabbatical position. I didn’t know much about independent schools, but my friend, Gwen, was one of my very close friends from teaching in China. She was like, ‘You might enjoy an independent school. It might give you some of the pieces that you liked about being at an international school — just locally.’ It was a seventh-grade position. The teacher that was here, Barb Kanoy [longtime science teacher who retired in 2021] , took a yearlong sabbatical. I thought I would just be here for a year. I was like, ‘Well, we’ll see how it goes. I’m going to see if I like North Carolina. I’m going to see if I like an independent school. And we’ll just see how it goes.’ Now I’ve been here for 10 years.”

DA: During those 10 years, you’ve occupied so many different roles and touched so many different parts of the Middle School. What has this place given you?

Mack: “I’ve been very lucky. I’ve worked with a lot of people here, and that piece is also really important to me: the collaborative nature of teaching. I get so much out of the people I work with and bouncing ideas off each other, trying things and talking through what works and what doesn’t. I’ve been lucky enough in my years here to work with a lot of teaching teams because of the different things I’ve taught. It’s those pieces that help me feel like I’m growing as a professional, but then also feeling like I can be responsive to meet the needs of the kids. It’s those pieces that are huge.”

DA: Since March 2021, you’ve visited nearly all of the 40-plus sites in the North Carolina State Parks system — oftentimes with travel companion and Middle School colleague Karen Richardson. What have you gained from your state park adventures in the last three and a half years?

Mack: “I love the mountains. That holds something special to me. I’ve really enjoyed some of the parks that are out there. I also thought Jockey’s Ridge was really cool: It’s out by the Outer Banks, and it’s got the tallest active sand dune system in the Eastern U.S. I even love the ones that are around here. Eno River State Park is one of my favorites. I like the trails there. I’ve just enjoyed exploring the parks. Some are great for a long visit, and some are good for a stop through.

“For me, it helps me slow down, kind of decompress. It’s just enjoying the beauty of the things that are around me. I think it’s getting out of my comfort zone. I also love to travel. That’s one of the things I loved about being overseas. I got to travel to a bunch of different countries, see a lot of different things, be exposed to a lot of different cultures. All of that was so amazing. I have just truly enjoyed seeing the state and this area. It just gets you to different parts that you wouldn’t normally go to. It gives you things to do and things to see. I feel better going and exploring a little bit.”

DA: You’ve been involved with CBL planning, and now you’re heavily involved in the management of Toddle. How does the Middle School continue to serve its learners?

Mack: “I am a middle school teacher first before I am a content teacher or anything else. It’s about the people. The beauty of the 10 years I’ve been here is that has never changed. That has never wavered. We think about how best to prepare our learners in that process and to prepare them for the future. As time has gone on, those conversations continue to change and evolve. That’s kind of where CBL comes in. When you strip everything away, how do we make sure that our kids are prepared for the future and they understand where they need to go in their journey to make progress? I think that we have always had conversations about that. I just think that we’re continuing to dig into that more deeply with the changes that we’ve made over the years. It’s just really continuing to look at our practice and how we meet the needs of our kids.”

DA: As you near the end of your first decade here, why do you continue to choose DA?

Mack: “It’s the people. For me, it’s the connections that I have with the colleagues I’ve worked with — and the kids and parents. I think that is what makes it such a great place. It’s a place that’s open to change and trying new, innovative things — and I have always felt supported to do that. When I started here, I would have never, ever wanted to be in any sort of role that even smells of anything with having any sort of responsibilities outside of my classroom. But people have pushed me to try new things and pushed me out of my comfort zone. I love the variety. I love the new experiences. My career has allowed me that from different schools and different countries and different subjects.

“This has been the longest I’ve been at a school. I think the climate allows for me to feel like I could not necessarily reinvent myself, but rather pursue the things that I am passionate about and feel like I could do that in a space where it was going to be OK to try. That’s what it is. We want our kids to try. We want our kids to take risks. It’s felt nice that as an educator, I’ve been supported to do that in the way that we try to support our kids to do that. It’s been really cool.”