There were many changes this school year. We have gone from trimesters to semesters, expanded senior privileges and experienced an influx of teachers in the upper school. Mrs. Mim Brown, Ms. Dani Douglass, Mrs. Leanne Ricketson, Mr. Patrick McGraw and Mrs. Juliet Wagner have made the jump from teaching middle school to teaching upper school.

Mrs. Brown has not completely transferred to upper school, but she does teach one section of 10th grade English. Mr. JP Culley, a former member of the upper school faculty, began the discussion with Mrs. Brown about teaching math in the upper school years ago. However, math was not what she wanted to focus on when teaching.

“I was more interested in teaching English,” Mrs. Brown said, “because my major is in English.”

She has enjoyed teaching upper school this year because she gets to interact with her former students and see how they have progressed in their academic careers.

“It’s really fun to see my babies, these grown people, walking through the door now,” Mrs. Brown said. “It’s fun to be able to discuss things at a different level.”

Mr. McGraw has also started teaching upper school classes while maintaining his position in the middle school. He now teaches upper school English and two semester classes that focus on Shakespeare and Jane Austen.

Unlike Mrs. Brown and Mr. McGraw, Mrs. Ricketson, Ms. Douglass and Mrs. Wagner only teach in the upper school now. Mrs. Ricketson, who began her career teaching in the upper school, now teaches 10th and 11th grade English.

“I always liked both middle school and high school,” Mrs. Ricketson said.

All of the teachers notice a big difference between teaching middle school and upper school.

“The middle schoolers are such eager little beavers,” Mrs. Ricketson said. But “once high schoolers are engaged, their world experience and life experience is a little bit more in place, so they can draw from more real-world examples.”

Like Mrs. Ricketson, Mrs. Wagner began teaching only upper school Spanish classes this year. She teaches Spanish two, four, and four honors, which allows her to teach students from every grade except the senior class. She taught many of her students in middle school, so she has the opportunity to teach them again now.

Ms. Douglass is another teacher that made the switch to upper school. She teaches French two, three, four and AP, which allows her to do so much more with the language in comparison to teaching middle school French.

“I like being able to teach certain aspects of the language because for so many years, it’s vocab over and over again,” Ms. Douglass said. “It can get kind of stagnant.”

Though Ms. Douglass did have to give up teaching her middle school kids, she still has the opportunity to them.

“I miss my kids from last year,” Mrs. Douglass said, “but they come to see me all the time.”