New teachers make new homes
A classroom can be like a second home for teachers, with all their posters and pictures hanging on the walls, the room littered with past projects and beloved objects. There are so many memories made within.
It can be hard to make a empty space one’s own, but that is exactly what the seven new teachers at Newbury Park High School are setting out to do. As Afton Washburn, Laura Jackson, Ada Abregu Galvez, Darin Erickson, Alex Garcia, Daniel Martinez, and Jason Rosebaugh are settling in for the school year, they are bringing their memories, decorations, and personalities with them.
Even though Algebra 1 and geometry teacher Washburn dreamed to be on Broadway as a teenager, she just felt an itch to be a teacher, which is why she is now making Room D20 her new home. After making many different decisions in her life, she said she believes that her optimistic outlook helped her.
“I’ve been blessed with a pretty positive attitude. . . I’ve probably been disappointed in the past because I’ve been too positive, but I really do like to see each day as a new chance, a new opportunity, to do something good in this world,” Washburn said.
Jackson, teaching geometry honors and Algebra 2 in Room D1, also thinks she is optimistic, but admits that she is a realist too. As for her dream as a teenager, while she said she always played school growing up, she did not know what she wanted to do until later in life.
Differing from the other two teachers, in Room B27 sits Spanish teacher Galvez whose least favorite subject was math. Galvez went to college in Spain at the famous Universidad Complutense de Madrid. This past summer, she decided to go back to her college town and also travelled to Belgium.
Not too far from Newbury Park sits California Lutheran University, the college attended by incoming biology and biotech teacher Erickson. In his new home, Room D7, memories were made before school even began, having to transfer his things from where he last taught at Westlake High School; however, there was more to those days than just moving things around.
“I binged the entire season of Game of Thrones. . . I had a routine: I’d teach summer school, go over to Westlake, fill up my truck with stuff, drop it off here on the tables, then go home and watch two episodes of Game of Thrones,” Erickson said.
Erickson also loves chocolate, which happens to be the favorite ice cream flavor of Algebra 1 CP and Algebra 1B teacher and Ventura County native Alex Garcia, who moved back here this summer from Texas. Unlike Galvez, the inhabitant of Room F4 loves math and wants to motivate students to pay more attention in class.
“I’d like to point out that, you know, any career if you add math to it pays more. If you can do the math behind a certain job, it’ll pay more,” Garcia said.
The occupant of Room B14, Special Education teacher Martinez, tries to make his students love the subjects he’s teaching. He applies his teaching philosophy of making learning fun and meeting the needs of all students, since everyone is different. Martinez transferred to NPHS came from a school that only taught Special Education, but was looking for a campus that had both, and was actually hired the very first day of school.
Rosebaugh also joined the faculty as a Special Education teacher. In room F5, students already know where to find him and have been going to ask Rosebaugh questions at lunch.
There is so much more to teachers than the subjects they are teaching, but it is in their classrooms where their year at Newbury Park High School will unfold. “I am happy to be. . . putting on the black and yellow. And I am looking forward to creating some great memories with my students whoever I get to teach,” Erickson said. Much more than teaching will take place here in these new homes.
