Thirty-seven years of teaching. AP Precalculus and Calculus AB teacher Anne Driewer may be new to Coppell ISD but she has some serious skin in the game.
Driewer’s versatility as an educator comes from teaching pre-K through eighth grade, to serving as a principal and sharing her knowledge with college students. She also applied her craft to rehabilitate incarcerated women through education, spending five years working at a women’s penitentiary in Nebraska.
“I realized I was not sure that I had had the same experiences or grown up in similar situations if I would have made any better choices than those women had made that got them into prison,” Driewer said. “Every time I left I wanted to be a better mother so my children would never make such poor choices.”
For Driewer, being a single mother has made upholding strong family values non-negotiable. Following her divorce, she refused to leave her seven children in a vulnerable position, instead reinforcing a team mentality.
“When I got divorced, I had a baby that was 15 months old and I had an autistic son, my oldest, that basically needed the care of a baby,” Driewer said. “So my children in between had no choice but to step it up. A friend of mine told me to get a bunch of sticks, and visually show them, because they were little, kindergarten through eighth grade: we can break one stick easily, but when we have all our eight sticks together, we are really hard to break.”
Driewer’s youngest daughter graduated from high school in May, all of her children embodying the selfless mindset they grew up with, now as adults.
“When I moved to Texas, my kids still living in Nebraska take a weekend with their eldest brother and I go back every six weeks,” Driewer said. “But we are on a rotating schedule, and everybody realizes he is our love, he is part of our family. It is not just mom’s responsibility, he is our brother too.”
Her background truly resonates with her steadfast outlook as a mother.
“My mother died of cancer when she was only 33,” Driewer said. “I always had this underlying motivation of, ‘If I were to die today, what would my kids remember about me? Would I want them to think of me as a crabby mom who always complained or would I want them to have good memories of me?’”
Driewer brings the relentless energy she dedicates to raising her children into the classroom.
“I was a proud straight A student for most of high school, but I left Ms. Driewer’s pre-calculus class first semester junior year with a D-,” said former student Hannah Hames, a Lincoln Pius X Catholic High School in Nebraska 2019 graduate . “I came in most every day during lunch where she re-taught me what she had gone over in our class earlier, one-on-one. She was easily one of the most impactful teachers I encountered in my time at Pius because she truly desired my success.”
Driewer’s teaching style is a reflection of her past. She hands out daily quizzes, three questions and one more for extra credit and leaves handwritten comments on students’ papers, mirroring teachers she has had in the past.
After reaching empty-nester status, Driewer moved to Texas to live with daughter Mary Gonzales.
“She enjoys the generational aspect of it,” Gonzales said. “She gets to live with her grandkids and they get their Nana living with them, which is pretty rare. I know she loves getting to be a part of our random dance parties or getting to share breakfast on the weekends, seeing her grandkids grow up a little more every day, not just through a FaceTime call from Nebraska.”
Gonzales’s career aspirations are backed by her mother’s efforts to leave a well-rounded and lasting impression on education.
“Just in the past decade I have held a number of different roles in a number of different industries,” Gonzales said. “I was a fourth grade teacher for a while, now I do management in IT consulting and I have done full stack web development before. A common theme for a lot of the jobs that I have found has been because of that desire to learn my mom fostered in us.”
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