K R I S TA C O L L I N S
Krista Collins Retires from the Math Department by Joe Sheppard P’93, ’94
Krista Stearns came to Lawrence Academy in 1992, fresh from a master’s degree program at Northeastern University, where she taught math to adults who were returning to college and had to take algebra. “That was probably the class of the most tears I’ve ever had in my entire career,” she says with a laugh. Like all new boarding-school teachers, Krista quickly found herself in the thick of school life, coaching cross-country, volleyball, and tennis; serving on various committees; and, after a couple of years, finding the time to marry Michael Collins. (The couple now has three children, all LA graduates: Sean ’14, Emma ’16, and Danny ’19.) Krista’s greatest accomplishments, however, were in LA’s math department, which she chaired for many of her 31 years on campus. “We’ve always been very innovative, very
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cutting-edge, very ahead of the curve,” Krista says, a note of pride in her voice. “Sometime before 2010, we decided to write our own textbooks. We organized the whole thing, and we spent summers writing. And that’s when we did the whole ‘flipped’ classroom, too. For homework, kids would watch videos we made, and the textbooks we wrote had embedded links to them. This way we could spend more one-on-one time working with the kids in class.” Now living at their lake house in New Hampshire, the Collinses are building a “winter home” in Vermont, on land owned by their son Sean and his wife, Franchesca (Kiesling) ’14. Krista “doesn’t have any big plans for retirement yet,” but she and Michael do hope to spend “a good chunk of the winter” in Hawaii, where their son Danny is in graduate school. However far away she may be, the LA community will feel the impact of Krista’s good work for a long time.
