Being new can always be difficult with challenges like asking where a place is located or asking for help. When you’re teaching in your old high school, however, this can bring back memories. It gives you an opportunity of re-experiencing them again, such as walking in the hallways and talking to your old teachers. Ms. Loftus came back home to teach at her old high school because she missed being around her family and friends that she grew up with.
Ms. Loftus recently graduated from the University of South Florida, in 2011. She taught psychology for one year at a school in Tampa, but this is her first year teaching AP Psychology. Loftus’s major is sociology, but she is still very delighted with teaching psychology because she likes teaching her students things that they can take home. And even though this is her old high school, she still finds it stressful because she’s a new teacher.
What Ms. Loftus misses the most about Santaluces are the football games and pep rallies; coming to the school again is just like reliving her old high school experience, but this time as a teacher. She enjoys seeing her old teachers too, such as Ms. Ewing and Mr. Krupa. She remembers that he was the assistant principal while she was in the school and her mom was really good friends with him.
“It’s pretty cool working with them, although I would never call them by their first names because it’s really weird,” said Loftus. “I can’t call them by their first names, to me they will always be my teachers.”
Loftus enjoys teaching psychology because it’s a very interesting class that can be applied in real world situations, and it teaches plenty about life and yourself. During class, Ms. Loftus often does activities with the students that have to do with the brain and explains why we do things a certain way, why we forget things easily and even how to study better. Psychology, compared to other subjects which goes in one ear and comes out the other, puts your life and your thoughts into a new perspective, whereas for other subjects most of the time there is no need to keep on retaining the lesson.
