Today we’d like to introduce you to Mariana Hughes.
Hi Mariana , thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I began my teaching career in 1995 as a kindergarten teacher in City Heights at Central Elementary. After five years at the elementary school level, the opportunity to teach high school and work with an important professional mentor, Stan Canaris, came up, and I couldn’t pass it up. I began teaching at Eastlake High School in April 2000 and I have found my professional home on this campus. I love teaching my 9th grade and 12th grade AP English students how to improve their critical reading and writing skills. It makes me so happy and proud when my students can feel their own progress and feel empowered to use their writing with more confidence. I am determined to help each student build their literacy skills and find reading material that they can enjoy outside of class. I truly believe that in today’s complicated society, educators are heroes! I am so, so, proud to be a public school teacher. I am so proud to work with so many amazing educators on my teaching teams, in my school, and in Sweetwater district.
Beyond my classroom, I enjoy serving my community as a board member for the Eastlake Education Foundation, the Eastlake Alumni and Friends Association, and the Live Like Micah Foundation. My classes also have a long tradition of completing service projects that relate to our curriculum or as a response to something occurring in our community or in our society. I always tell my kids that “We may not be able to fix the whole world, but each of us can do something.”
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
While I love my job, my school, and my students, being a teacher is not an easy job. I think the longer you teach, the better you can handle all of the professional responsibilities of the job such as curriculum, classroom management, new technology, etc. I think what has been more challenging, is navigating all of those duties while also trying to support students through the added stress that they are facing each year. In a world where kids can feel very isolated because of screen time, and very small because of the many big problems in the world, I try to remind my students every single day that they matter. Education is an important bridge to understanding how they fit into this world and strong literacy will help them navigate the challenges they will face in which ever profession they will enter. My students feel more pressure to be perfect in every area of their lives than ever before. The spike of kids on my rosters suffering from mental health issues is real and measurable. In addition to teaching kids how to read and write better so they can succeed academically, I also aim to help them appreciate how texts they read can bring them joy, hope, and awareness that can make them understand themselves and their society better.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I am a high school English teacher. I teach 9th grade students and 12th grade students. For a majority of my high school career I taught only 12th grade students, however, I recently went back to teaching 9th grade students again as well. The range of humans I deal with on any given day is tremendous and exhilarating. I have students who are applying to the top universities in the country, and I have 9th grade students who are still so nervous about being in high school and get so excited when I share candies with the class. If you look around my classroom, there is a clear theme: CUPCAKES! Years and years ago, I baked cupcakes for my first class of AP students on the day of their AP test. There were only 25 or so students and I thought it a fitting celebration of all of their hard work. I also secretly missed baking for my students, since I always enjoyed baking treats for my students when I taught kindergarten before making the switch to high school in 2000. So now, 25 years later, “Cupcake Day” is our tradition. However, instead of 25 students, I bake for up to 170 students. My teachin team, Ms. Collier and Ms. De La Parra have joined me and now we all bake dozens and dozens of homemade treats to show our students how proud we are of them and to celebrate the year we have shared together. Being a teacher is equal measures of love and learning.
Do you any memories from childhood that you can share with us?
When I was a child, although our family experienced many highs and lows, my mother always made it a point to make reading a big deal. She would plan elaborate “at homes” on Friday afternoons and she would share poetry and stories with my brother and sister and I. We would have to read poems out loud and she would have us act out scenes to stories we read. Even though at the time, what I was really looking forward to was the tray of goodies that was very rare in those days, she subtly taught us that words matter, and books matter, and art matters. I don’t remember all of the texts we shared, but I do remember that it was a special time on Friday afternoons. It was important and it was fancy and it helped us forget some of the other things we sometimes dealt with that were not so perfect. These were happy times and they imprinted a joy of reading in me at a young age that always made reading a very special and personal act.
