Imagine feeling the hard ground below your feet, inhaling the sweet smell of a campfire burning, and hearing the sound of the campfires crackling as a people gather around ready to roast their marshmallows.

Ellie O’Neal, a new teacher at NHS, is one of those people that you will always find outside doing fun activities. She enjoys to go out and do adventurous things with her husband and her three “fur babies”.

“I love to camp [and] canoe, I have two dogs and a cat so my husband and I do a lot of stuff with them,”  O’Neal said.

O’Neal goes camping all the time. This past summer she went camping around three or four times, her last trip being this past June.

While camping her and her husband participates in all kinds of camping activities

“We go hiking, see different things in the park,” O’Neal said. “We will go canoeing, cookout, have a bonfire, that kind of stuff.”

O’Neal is very passionate about spending time with her husband and her dogs, but other than her love for camping, she loves teaching math.

O’Neal has been teaching upper level math classes for five years at Clinton Central Jr/Sr High School. At NHS, O’Neal teaches ACP Calculus and Quantitative Reasoning. She has always loved helping students understand the material that she is teaching.

“My mom always tutored when I was growing up and since I was five years old, I was always in there trying to help her teach the kids,” O’Neal said. “ I loved watching her help them make those connections and always wanted to help her. So I was really seeing that in action. It made me realize that’s what I wanted to do.”

O’Neal students are able to observe always so energetic when she is talking about math. Her students can constantly tell that she enjoys what she is talking about.

Aubrie Deal, senior at NHS, has had the same teacher for the majority of her high school career, but this year she got O’Neal. Deal noticed how much  O’Neal loved what she was teaching.

“I absolutely love how passionate she is about teaching. It’s something you don’t see in most teachers. I can just see it in her eyes and her facial expressions that this is what she was born to do and she loves every second of it,” Deal said.

Senior Oliva Long agrees with Deal about how they have noticed that O’Neal is a very dedicated teacher, that she enjoys what’s she doing.

“She is very energetic, when she talks about math. She literally just starts yelling facts at you,” Long said. “She is really dedicated to it.”