Mr. Russell Lee began the 2025 – 2026 school year as a new math teacher at EHHS. Mr. Lee is a person and an educator with various layers and experiences that impacts his unique teaching style. His empathy and his visual inclusion for all his students is evident from everyone who enters his classroom.
Mr. Lee discussed his relatable and understanding character as a teacher;“And I think students see me first and foremost as a fellow human, not as someone who is better than them. I think I treat them as equals, as teammates who are in this journey together, and try to let them know I care about them, and it kind of sets me apart from maybe other math teachers they’ve had in the past.” Above everything else, Mr. Lee prioritizes his students’ mental health and effort over work, his ability to understand his students by making it known that “we are in this together.”
Throughout Mr. Lee’s life, he has lived in a lot of different places, but the most significant event was in 2017 when his first daughter passed away at a very young age. He states that “it was by far the worst thing that’s ever happened to me” but also added: “In a lot of ways, it made me a better person, as crazy as that sounds, but it really, really instilled in me the idea that everybody goes through difficult things and is navigating them every day, whether its death or sickness, or financial hardship.” Mr. Lee wants students to “learn math. But at the end of the day, I also equally want them to feel like [my classroom] was a space where they were welcome and they were nurtured as people.”
Mr. Lee focuses his teaching style on seeing his students as people to motivate them to become better students and mathematicians. One of his students, Jayla Santiago, stated: “Mr. Lee is a very educated, funny, empathetic person. Even though I have only had him as a teacher for a short period of time, he has already made me better at math. And I haven’t failed yet.”
First, Mr. Lee started teaching in New Orleans, afterwards he taught in South Carolina until he moved to Washington DC to teach at a public charter school. In that school his students were very independent and had to go across town to get themselves to school; causing students to have poor attendance. At EHHS he realized that the attendance is amazing and mostly everyone shows up to his class, “I think everybody’s really positive, like every high school is going to have the occasional fight or silly incident, but I think for the most part here, students like each other. Everybody seems respectful, and I think it allows me to focus on teaching and how”.
This differed from his experiences as a teenager, school came easy to him and that impacted how teachers and administrators treated him compared to his friends who weren’t as smart. He watched how students were treated like they were mistreated just because they weren’t as academically successful. This installed a different perspective into him that came from experiencing this; “It originally wasn’t even about college and taking control of your future. It was just getting afforded that level of respect and being taken seriously.” His experiences impacted his mindset that education is important for success, so he wants to be that person/mentor to get a student there. He says, “I like the idea of someone being able to determine what they do with their life. And that, to me, education is the great equalizer. If you get these degrees, if you graduate high school, if you go to college, you open up a world of possibilities that, like I can determine what I want to be.”
