Adrianne Penullar,
M.S., M.Ed.

Chemistry was never just a subject to me.

I studied microbiology at the University of Arizona. After graduation, I started Tutoring Formula LLC with a group of friends — we’d all watched students around us hit the exact same walls in chemistry, over and over, and nobody was explaining it the right way.

That’s where I fell headfirst into organic chemistry. Synthesis problems, reaction mechanisms, functional groups — I loved all of it. Still do. I’d stay up working through orgo problems just because they were interesting.

Six months and a complete change of direction.

I enrolled in an alternative teaching certificate program and student-taught under a chemistry teacher with over fifty years in the classroom. Old school. Textbook-structured. Chemistry at heart.

He showed me what a great chemistry classroom actually looks like from the inside: rigorous, warm, and built on genuine belief that every student can get it if you find the right way to explain it. That stuck with me.

I had no idea that classroom would eventually become mine.

They hired me to teach Anatomy.

Which was not the plan. But I built the curriculum, taught it for a full year at a Title 1 school, and figured out something important early: the content doesn’t scare me — it’s the classroom itself that takes time to master. Classroom management, building relationships with students who’ve had complicated experiences with school — that’s the real first-year challenge.

I call it transferable. I meant it. Every skill I built that year made me a better chemistry teacher in year two.

The district asked me to build the curriculum.

Not just teach it — design it. During and after COVID, I was part of the team that selected textbooks and built curriculum frameworks used across the district. I visited other schools, collaborated with chemistry teachers doing incredible work, and came home with better ideas every time.

This is still some of the work I’m most proud of. When a student opens a chemistry textbook in this district, there’s a chance I helped choose it. That matters to me.

My mentor teacher retired. He left me his classroom.

He’d already told me before he left that AP Chemistry was going to be mine. Fifty years of legacy — the hardest course, the highest stakes, the one he’d spent a career perfecting. I’m building my own curriculum for it now, from scratch, informed by everything I’ve learned since that first student-teaching placement.

Nationally, only about 18% of AP Chemistry students earn a 5 on the exam (2025 College Board data). My job — in the classroom and in tutoring — is to be the reason that number is higher for the students I work with.

I teach high school and college at the same time.

For eight years I’ve been an adjunct professor at the community college level — General Chemistry, Fundamental Chemistry, Chem 151 and 152. I teach both levels simultaneously, which means I know exactly where the gap between high school and college chemistry is, because I cross it every single week.

When a college student tells me their professor moves too fast, I know exactly what they mean — I teach that course. When a parent tells me their kid needs to be ready for college-level chem, I know what that actually requires.

That’s not a talking point. It’s the thing that makes tutoring from me different from tutoring from a grad student who only knows one of those worlds.