SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. (NEWS10) — A technology teacher at St. Clement’s School in Saratoga Springs is using her cancer diagnosis to create a meaningful lesson for her students.
When you walk into Sherry Knotek’s Technology and STEM class at St. Clement’s, it’s clear right away that she’s every student’s favorite.
Fourth grade student Henry Rosborough said, “I personally love this class. Mrs. Knotek is awesome.”
“I always loved it. It was one of my favorite classes here,” said Emery Moser, a former student of Mrs. Knotek.
In 2021, Mrs. Knotek was diagnosed with a tumor on her pancreas with a rare neuro endocrine cancer. It hit her students hard. Moser stated, “I found out a few years ago she had cancer. I’ve always felt like some sort of connection to her because of how much she impacted me. I was really upset because of how much I loved her.”
Knotek explained, “I felt like I need to start saying goodbye.”
She received aggressive treatment for a year and half at Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute where she still goes every month.
“The research that I see go on there is amazing,” she explained. “They are just phenomenal. I wanted to raise money for them.”
She did it in the best way she knew how — through the use of technology and by putting her students to work coding for cancer.
“Technology is having such a huge impact on cancer research,” Knotek said. “I just want to inspire these kids to just to embrace technology.”
Each grade, K-12 has been divided up into teams as students develop basic code and raise money in the process.
“I like research, I like helping people, and those are two main factors in coding for cancer,” said Rosborough. “I like that you can basically do whatever you put your mind to, and you can basically do whatever your imagination takes you to.”
Each step helping to provide building blocks for the future of medicine. “They are at a very low level of that computer code, but it works up to the code that pounds through the code. That data to brings treatments to approval so much sooner,” said Knotek.
Even the errors serve as lessons for Rosborough.
“Throughout life you are going to crash and burn. People do. It’s sometimes, it’s unavoidable. So it’s good to learn that early on, instead of learning it when you’re an adult, and you can’t handle it,” he said.
Moser added,” You always have to redo something and that’s okay. You can always end up making something out of it.”
Just as her favorite teacher has shown her, making the most out of a scary diagnosis.
Knotek recalled, “Months! It took me to get off my couch, get back in the classroom, and say, no, this is where I want to be and I’m not wasting a minute.”
Coding for Cancer will culminate on December 10 when students from St. Clement’s and Saratoga Catholic Central will code for an hour.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
