“Today is always a melancholy day,” Matthew Jochmans wrote to a group of Towson High School teachers on Snapchat last Sunday. The teachers were commiserating over the end of summer; school would start up again in a week.

The physics teacher was about to set out for his annual bike ride on the Northern Central Railroad Trail to close out the season. The message would be his last to the group chat.

While on the trail, Jochmans, 43, died after having a cardiac episode Aug. 18, according to his mom, Monica Jochmans.

Matthew Jochmans, who spent his entire 18-year teaching career at Towson High School, leaves behind his parents and stepparents, along with many friends and former students who remember him for his belly laughs, dynamic teaching style and love for people. A public celebration of his life is still being planned, his mother said.

On the Sunday that Matthew Jochmans died, Monica Jochmans’ phone kept ringing. The caller ID read “Breast Health.”

“What the heck do my breasts want with me?” she said to her husband while ignoring the two calls.

She didn’t know it was a health care professional trying to deliver bad news. Her former husband, Steve Jochmans, got the call instead. Then he called his son’s mother.

“Sit down. You have to sit down,” she recalled Steve Jochmans telling her on the phone.

Matthew Jochmans was born Feb. 16, 1981, in Corpus Christi, Texas. He lived in several states growing up. After his parents divorced, he moved with his mother to Minnesota where he graduated from Roseville Area High School in 1999. He went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in physics and math at Michigan State University in 2004.

Six years ago, Monica Jochmans and her husband, Bernard Grisez, moved to Towson to be closer to their son. She kept her name from her prior marriage in hopes she could have the same last name as her future grandchildren. But her only child never had kids and never married. Three years ago, however, she met his chosen family: teachers at Towson High who he spent most of his time with inside and outside the school.

A bike accident on the same trail brought Matthew Jochmans’ parents and friends together.

His former boss was already at the scene when Monica Jochmans arrived back in 2021. Throughout his time in the hospital, his colleagues kept him company and brought him food.

After cleaning out his classroom on Wednesday, about half a dozen of Matthew Jochmans’ friends, as well as his parents and stepmother, Jody Jochmans, exchanged memories at Charles Village Pub and Patio in Towson.

There was the time Matthew Jochmans jumped in a bitter cold Deep Creek Lake when the tightknit group of teachers rented an Airbnb at the height of the pandemic.

“Matt attended a department meeting and taught a class from the hot tub,” said Lindsay Karsos, his friend and fellow science teacher at Towson High.

Derrick Jackson, a music teacher, talked about how both he and Jochmans applied for the National Board Certification. It’s a lengthy and challenging process that could up a teacher’s pay by as much as $17,000.

“We both were going to find out in December if we passed,” Jackson said.

Jochmans’ colleagues often teased him for being popular and an overachiever. He had a bunch of teacher awards and was already four weeks ahead on lesson plans for this school year.

“He had already set up his classroom,” Jackson said. “He had already written all of his students’ names on index cards. He had already printed out work for the next day.”

No one else put in more time with the students, the music teacher said.

Friends also marveled at how much information Matthew Jochmans knew. He was the person everyone would want on their trivia team, yet he kept his humility.

“You would never know how popular he was, how smart he was, what he’s done, his awards,” said Steve Jochmans. “He wouldn’t talk about that.”

His intelligence paired nicely with his sense of humor, and he’d go to great lengths to get a laugh.

Karsos recalled an April Fools’ prank her late friend pulled on Holly West, the former head of the science department who hired Matthew Jochmans in 2006.

The physics teacher went into West’s office very concerned, saying parents caught wind of a question he put on a test — something funny but slightly problematic.

“‘I don’t think I can support you on this, Matt. I don’t know if you’re going to have a job,’” Karsos remembered West saying. “Then he broke the silence and was like ‘No, it was April Fools.’”

He was known for his sense of humor among the students too, but also for his lessons.

“You were very much involved in every lesson that he taught,” said Elise Longanecker, who graduated in the spring. “It wasn’t a situation where you could shy away from the rest of the class.”

Jochmans would hang bowling balls from the ceiling to demonstrate tension and push kids on skateboards in his classroom while teaching about force. His dad and stepmother watched him drop eggs from the roof when they’d visited his class just before Thanksgiving break.

When Nate Dowdy was a junior at Towson High, Matthew Jochmans was his physics teacher. Dowdy wasn’t “the greatest student” but still had plans to go to college. He didn’t know Jochmans as well as other students but hoped he’d write his recommendation letter. So he asked.

“Ah, Nate, I already have like 50 of these,” Dowdy, a 2011 graduate, recalled his teacher saying.

“But I don’t really have a lot of teachers in mind,” Dowdy responded.

Jochmans agreed, and Dowdy later got into High Point University.

Physics classes were filled with juniors and seniors — in other words, a lot of stressed-out teenagers thinking about the future, said 2021 graduate Kayla Yup. She was one of them. What she liked about Jochmans was how he always took students seriously.

“It’s hard to find an adult like that,” she said.

The summer before senior year, she needed advice about her future. She didn’t know what type of science she should pursue in college. She emailed her teacher for help, and he told her it’s OK if she ever changed her mind.

“Go with the flow of the river, don’t make a choice of destination until you have seen what the river shows you,” he wrote Yup.

She’s now a rising senior studying biology at Yale University.

“It’s going to be really weird” starting the school year without Jochmans, said Dylan Dalsimer, a rising senior at Towson High.

Joch, as Dalsimer called him, knew Dalsimer and his sister, Maura, their entire lives. Their dad, Kevin Dalsimer, teaches AP Calculus at the school. Maura was planning to be Jochmans’ homeroom helper this school year, her first year in high school. She’d planned on going with him and her dad to the Renaissance Festival. The hardest part of all this for Kevin Dalsimer was telling his 14-year-old daughter the bad news.

Clara Bryant, a 2011 Towson High graduate who took Jochmans’ class as a junior, will be taking over the physics teacher’s classes. This is her first year as a teacher, and up until last Sunday, she was prepared to teach math. After Jochmans died, Kevin Dalsimer recommended she take over the physics classes. She feels OK about it since she took physics in college and remembers the labs from Jochmans’ classes.

“Everybody has told me there’s no pressure for you to be like Jochmans,” she said.

On her first day of new teacher orientation, Jochmans had stood outside New Town High School waiting for Bryant to arrive. He greeted her, still able to recognize her while she wore a mask, and walked her inside. She’d been stressed about the new job and was recovering from a cold. As she was signing in, he said to her, “Hey, it’s going to be OK.”

About the Education Hub

This reporting is part of The Banner’s Education Hub, community-funded journalism that provides parents with resources they need to make decisions about how their children learn. Read more.