There is a new teacher this year in MCHS. Katie Kelly teaches English and Honors English to 9th Graders here at Mason City, and she says her favorite part of teaching is being able to see and help facilitate change for the better in students and help establish it for them, academically and socially.
Mrs. Kelly has many goals for her classes, but her main focus is that she wants her students to leave better than they arrived, not only academically, but how they question things and look at the world. She says that no matter how rough a day might be, good days with students always outweigh them.
Mrs. Kelly’s advice to students is to, “Never view failure as a bad thing, and to always take it as a learning experience,” and she exemplifies this in all of her classes. Personally, she originally wanted to teach in a much smaller school, but now she loves the diversity among students and the different ways of teaching in a larger school, as well as the ability to interact with lots of people. She is also currently finishing her Masters in psychology.
Her favorite unit to teach would either be the unit on Night by Elie Wiesel or Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare. Night revolves around the author’s experience with his father in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, and she loves teaching it because it gives students a lot of information that they didn’t know before, and a lot to think about in regards to this dark part of world history. She enjoys teaching Romeo and Juliet, because it is, of course, a classic as well as one of if not the most influential plays in the world, and is just generally fun to teach and analyze.
Mrs. Kelly says her main reason for teaching is to have a positive influence both academically and personally, whether that means helping them in an academic area or being the support that they don’t have otherwise, or whatever it means to someone in order to be a positive influence, even just a little bit, in several students’ lives.