RAYMOND – Florence Chambers of Raymond, who teaches mathematics at Southern Maine Community College in South Portland, recently won a national teacher award.

Chambers has worked in education for 43 years, half of which has been spent in the community college system. For he last 11 years, the mathematics professor has called Raymond home and taught at Southern Maine Community College in South Portland.

On Nov. 10, which was also her birthday, Chambers traveled to Austin, Texas, to receive the 2011 Teaching Excellence Award, sponsored by the American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges, which presents the award to six professors throughout the country every other year.

Chambers, who lives across from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s boyhood home on Hawthorne Road with her husband, Frank, is delighted to win the prestigious award.

“I was deeply honored when the mathematics department here at SMCC nominated me for this award and was overwhelmed when I learned that I was one of this year’s recipients,” she said.

Chambers was also nominated two years ago by fellow SMCC faculty but failed to win, making the honor even more special.

“The SMCC community is fortunate to have a professor of Florence’s caliber,” said Ronald Cantor, the community college’s president. “She and her colleagues provide solid mathematical foundations for a skilled, innovative workforce.”

Chambers had spent most of her adult life teaching math. The first half of her career, during which she moved around the country a lot with her military husband, was spent teaching math at the elementary, high school and private college level. Born and raised in New York City, her first teaching job was in Jamaica, N.Y., at her own high school alma mater.

In 1989, she began what would be an eight-year stint at Joliet Junior College outside of Chicago. Joliet was the first two-year college in the nation, and that’s where Chambers says she was bit by the community college bug. Since leaving Joliet, she worked at community colleges in Michigan and upstate New York before landing at SMCC.

“I truly love the variety of folks you get in a community college setting,” Chambers says of her students, many of whom come back to school mid-career and may need remedial math courses too basic to be offered at a four-year college. “And particularly with mathematics, the beauty of it is that students can start anywhere.”

Chambers teaches a wide range of math courses at SMCC, ranging from numerical arithmetic “on up to calculus, and everything in between,” she said. And in addition to teaching math full time for the college, Chambers has also directed the SMCC chorus since 2002.

Chambers also said she loves the challenge of teaching especially “to be able to explain things so people can understand them wherever they may be in their mathematical development.”

“When the light goes on, it’s amazing,” she said.

Florence Chambers