BY RUBEN CARILLO
Describe how your teaching tactics have changed over the years? When I first started teaching, we lectured. Students sat quietly and took notes and tests. Now my students are more involved. I ask about experiences and try to make the literature mean something to them and their lives. It is a lot messier, a lot noisier, and a lot more demanding, but it is also more satisfying.
Who has helped you the most during your years of teaching? My husband of 43 years for his unfailing support and understanding and our son and daughter who first, as students, taught me what it was like to sit on the parents’ side of the desk during a conference and later for guidance in my curriculum choices.
Why did you decide to teach the subject that you teach? In 10th grade, we were assigned to read Idylls of the King. I loved the selection, aren’t all tenth graders interested in people in love, and could hardly wait to get to class to see what the teacher would say about it. She stood in front of us, collected our homework papers, and went back to her desk to grade them. I sat there thinking of how I would have taught the class. The bug bit. From then on, I knew what I wanted to do and never thought of any other career. Who knows, maybe one of my students has sat in my class and thought the same thing I did: “I could do a better job.”
What did you want to be when you were a child? Much to my mother’s horror, I wanted to be a carhop.