An Interview With Mr. Mello, EVHS’ Principal: “I want to see a change happen in the way that we teach and learn.”
“I think what’s important is that we get timely, accurate information out to people. Not through the paper, or through a second source, not through a telephone chain of concerned people, but that people have an opportunity to hear from me about what is going on.”
These were Mr. Mello’s, Eastern View’s principal, first words when he was asked about his role in The Storm Front, Eastern View’s first and only blog.
Mr. Mello comes to Eastern View from Rappahannock County High School in Rappahannock County, Virginia. Their loss was Culpeper’s gain. Mr. Mello grew up in Fairfax City, Virginia and was an active participant in his high school, Fairfax High School. His father worked at the Smithsonian, which provided his children with interesting knowledge and educational experiences. He is the fourth of four children; his older brother, Craig Mello, was a Nobel Prize winner for medicine in 2006. His two older brothers are both 6’4’’, so Mr. Mello isn’t the only one who inherited the family gene of his incredible size. He used this size to his advantage in high school; he played football and wrestled. He also threw the discus in track. He got scholarship offers for both sports. He went to UVA on a scholarship for wrestling. Besides lunch, his favorite parts of high school were his history and English classes. He loves to write and read. He, like many, struggled with math.
If he could change one thing about his high school experience, he would have sat in the front row. Looking back he now says, “I wish somebody had shown me opportunities beyond high school. If you had asked me why I went to school when I was a junior I would have told you to play sports. I had very little sense of this is training me to go to college. I would have liked to have had more focus on what was going to happen next [after high school].” Luckily, Mr. Mello said that because he could write well college was not a struggle for him. He attended the University of Virginia.
Mr. Mello loved his high school experience and the mentors who helped him. “I love my subject. I love leading, and sharing thoughts. So a year after I graduated from college I applied for a job and began teaching and coaching. What I found was that I love teaching. Kids wanted to take my classes. I found what I thought worked for kids.” He taught subjects like English and World History; he even taught German after the past teacher quit two days before school. The assistant principal hired him on the spot because he could properly say Wienerschnitzel.
“What I found was I loved teaching and working in a classroom, and I saw that what I was doing was really helping kids. And so I thought that maybe if I was an assistant principal, maybe I could get some of things that I’m seeing work spread through the school and help more people. So I completed a master’s degree and I started my assistant principal role. Quickly I discovered that the job of the assistant principal was discipline. So after doing that for three years, I thought to myself that if I really wanted to try to get instruction to where to where I think it can be fun for the teachers and fun for the kids, I needto be in the principal’s office. I became a principal because I wanted to see a change happen in the way that we teach and learn, not because I’ve always wanted to be a principal.”
His favorite part about being a high school principal is the people. “It’s such a privilege to be able to work with people who are at such pivotal moments in their lives. Pushing them in the right direction creates a lot of momentum. It’s a privilege to be able to work with young people and see how they develop. To essentially see all the personalities that make up our building…”
Mr. Mello takes his job as principal very seriously. “What I admire most in school is people working together to accomplish great things. What really bothered me in high school was when people chose to work together to be destructive. The mob mentality: turning peers into victims. That’s the kind of thing I’m not going to let happen [here at Eastern View].
According to Mr. Mello, education is crucial in today’s world. “The world is becoming a more complicated place. The relationships between the world are getting smaller. Our kids don’t just compete with the kid next door; they compete with the kid in India and China. So having [the] skill or ability to take all kinds of diverse information and make sense of it is going to be an employment skill for the rest of this century. This is the information age. You log onto the internet and do a keyword search and it will bring you back a hundred titles, a thousand links, but which of those are good information and which of those are bad information? You guys [the students], more than ever, need to be able to read critically, think critically, and draw conclusions. [This has] changed, because it used to be, forty years ago, if there was an issue we needed to get information on, we got out Encyclopedia Britannica or Webster’s Dictionary and there was the answer. Now you guys [the students] have twenty answers or a thousand answers to choose from. You have to figure out what it is that you believe.”
“I think that one thing that a lot of our kids struggle with here are the people who do not have very high expectations of them, other than to behave. I want to try to change that. I want to get people to come in with an understanding that high school leads to college or trade school. It’s not just important that you behave but that you prepare for that next step.”
Students need to be able to take that next step, and he wants their high school to be there to help them do it. Mr. Mello promotes intellectual tenacity, not just curiosity, to push students even farther down the path to success. He cites his brother as a good source of inspiration. “When it came down to [my brother’s] breakthrough (the one who won the Nobel Prize): there were 10,000 slides of the C. elegans worm that he was studying. On each slide there was a hundred samples. He knew that if they found a mutation on one of the worms on a slide that they had this Nobel-Prize-winning breakthrough. So ten thousand slides with a hundred samples each was a million little squiggly worms to look at under a microscope. They found the mutation in the last fifty slides, so 99,950 wrong answers… He was wrong all those times, but in the last fifty slides he found the mutation. That’s intellectual tenacity. So when I see kids who don’t just like a subject but love it, I know we have to keep feeding that [passion].”
Mr. Mello has some final personal advice for students at Eastern View. “”Learn the expectations. Ask questions. Find what fascinates you. And treat others the way you’d like to be treated.”
