Natalia Whyte – The Recipe for Winning

NATALIA Whyte is no stranger to adversity. After losing both her brother and father at a tender age, her mother was forced to remove her from the tenement yard in Grants Pen, St Andrew that they called home due to gun violence. She would later lose her mother, who struggled to care for her and her sibling single-handedly as a domestic helper, also to health complications.

The odds were already stacked against her and she had to dig deep within herself to find the recipe for winning. Today Whyte is a seasoned science teacher, motivational speaker, and author of the book Recipe for Winning: A Guide to Success.

Whyte was only 10 years old when her mother took her to live in St James, and though she had no way of knowing it yet, she was being prepared from that time to use her disappointments as stepping stones to success.  She went on to attend Westwood High School, where she realised her innate ability to explain complex concepts in a way that her peers understood, and her love for the sciences. She yearned to become a doctor but she knew the fees would have been insurmountable for her mother.

“So my only way to address my education was through scholarships because after my mother had buried her son and her husband she really didn’t have any savings to send me to school,” she said solemnly to All Woman last week.

“At the time the Government was providing scholarships for students who wanted to teach chemistry and physics and I was in love with chemistry so I decided to go for it.”

Whyte’s intention was to change course when an opportunity in medicine came along, but after starting her teaching programme at the Mico Teachers’ College she realised that she was in love with it.

“It turns out I was actually teaching from I was in high school,” Whyte pointed out. “Because when my teachers were absent they would always ask me to teach the class because they knew that I was good at explaining things.”

She delved into the programme optimistically, excited for the opportunities that would present themselves after graduation.  But she did not anticipate that tragedy would strike before she could walk across the stage.

“My mother had a heart condition and she died when I was still in my first year. I was devastated,” she reflected, shaking her head. She quickly added that, “I had teachers who I was very close to and my mother encouraged me to be close with them.  Even the Sunday before she died she called the two teachers with whom I was closest and told them that she would not be around for much longer and they should take good care of me.”

To this day those two teachers are still present in Whyte’s life and have stuck by her side as her mother would have if she were alive. Under their guidance, Whyte blossomed into a dynamic and impactful addition to the science department at Westwood High.

“I’ve always been motivating my students because sometimes they get overwhelmed by the different assessments and they have other things going on in their lives. Some of the students also board, so the challenges are different. So at the beginning of each class I have to ensure that they are motivated,” she shared.

She outlined her strategy for controlling her classroom and ensuring that her students understand even the most off-putting concepts in chemistry.

 “It’s not that they couldn’t do the chemistry, but they didn’t feel confident enough that they could, so I first started opening my classes with a motivational quote to propel them. Then I started writing my own quotes for them, until I started dedicating sessions each term to just having talks with them.”

This is how Whyte discovered that she not only had a knack for juicing the lemons that life threw at her, but also for teaching and inspiring others to make lemonade. She felt inspired to write a book.

“In January 2018, after reading Nicole McLaren-Campbell’s book Make it Count, I asked myself, why not write a book? After all it was my desire to become a motivational speaker and author,” she remembered. After toying with the idea for a while, and even writing most of the book, Whyte eased off the pedal.

“When Nicole released her second book my book was still being edited. I became fed up with the lies and excuses I would tell myself for not executing my writing goals. I was happy for her second book, but her accomplishment was a gnawing reminder that potential without work is nothing and ideas without discipline and execution are just ideas,” she said.

Simultaneously, Whyte was struggling to lose weight. After trying numerous diets and regimens for several years without much success, she realised that she had the formula to not just take control of her weight, but her entire life.

“I realised that I already had everything I needed to pen my book and lose weight,” she gushed about her eureka moment. “I realised that in my immediate circle I had recipes for weight loss and recipes for being an author. I have friends who had done what I aspired to do and were winning at it. I made a commitment that I was going to show up for Natalia, just like how every day I show up for my son, my students, and my friends. I was going to be accountable to myself.”

Whyte committed herself to a strict operation style of ‘complete consistency’, which forces her to keep moving in the direction of her goals even when she does not feel like it. She reaped the rewards of this habit a few months ago when her book was finally published. She is already looking forward to new goals for the New Year.

“I want to do educational consulting with my own science school,” the teacher, who has helped many students land a spots on the CSEC merit list in her eight years in the classroom, mused. “I want to teach science the way it is supposed to be taught: using a hands-on, principle-based approach, because we’re moving towards STEM, and many persons are not teaching science from a STEM approach. It’s back to ‘chalk and talk’, which is not very interactive, not very creative, not very innovative. So ultimately, I want to own my own mobile science school and I want to go around Jamaica at different times and just teach.”