Born in Victoria, British Columbia to a shipyard foreman and a hospital nurse, Margaret was the first in her family to attend university. She earned a B.Sc. in Mathematics from UBC in 1964 and went straight back to her hometown to teach. For thirty-eight years she taught algebra, geometry and calculus at Oak Bay Secondary School. Generations of students remembered her saying that math was not a wall to climb but a forest to walk through, slowly, until the paths started to feel familiar.

Margaret kept every thank-you card she ever received from a student. After she passed, her family found three shoeboxes of them in the closet, sorted by decade. Some are from people she taught in the 1960s, now in their seventies themselves, still writing to tell her she was the reason they didn't give up.