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By Aidan Inglish
With CTE teacher Cheyne Christensen stepping down at the semester, NS has called on two of their current employees to fill that void. Felipe Gonzalez will pick up half of Christensen’s computer classes and Austin Ison will add a couple periods of business classes for electives.
Gonzalez, who has been the Spanish liaison at the school for a couple of months, will now take on Christensen’s web development and digital business applications class. He will continue to work as the Spanish liaison for the school, but with reduced hours, and he will teach part-time. He has many ideas as to how he wants to teach the material in the class.
“I’m gonna do lessons, and I’m gonna do many small projects,” Gonzalez said. “I also want students to do some competitions and do projects that can benefit the school itself… We can do things like improving the graphics in school, like letterheads, designs for flyers and other graphics that they can also put on the school website.”
One thing that proves beneficial to the classes is Gonzalez’s degree in web development. Previously, it has been a challenge for the school to find someone that meets those qualifications.
“It’s hard to find someone in computer sciences that goes into teaching… because they work in industry,” Principal Christy Straatman said. “So having Mr. Gonzalez come in with a degree in that field I think is going to be powerful for the program.”
Gonzalez hopes he can teach in a way that will resonate with the students.
“I want the kids to know that I want to listen to them and go along with their needs
and with their interests,” Gonzalez said. “Because learning things is a stretch—you have to get out of your comfort zone to learn a new skill. In my experience, when you channel the learning process into things you care about, it makes it so much more enjoyable and doable.”
Gonzalez is not the only one who will teach CTE classes. Austin Ison will also take on the responsibility of some of Christensen’s classes. However, instead of teaching the original classes, he will teach a new class with similar material. This class will be about business management, which he has a degree in.
“I think it could be a really good thing for kids to take,” Ison said. “I think being able to know how to run their own business and [learn] more about finance and stuff would be good for them.”
Ison already has some experience teaching accounting, but he hopes to teach this class in a new way.
“I’d like to approach [the class] a little differently,” Ison said. “I teach accounting, and it’s a pretty set curriculum… whereas I think there could be a lot of different ideas and ways to go about teaching business management.”
He has considered a variety of ways to teach the material, from simple textbook lessons to having students create their own businesses.
“I’m going to try to keep it more of an open-minded scenario and [have] lots of discussion of what kids think and how they would run things and that kind of stuff,” he said.
He plans on using his first time teach- ing the class an experiment and continuing to improve from there.
“I think it will be a learning curve, a learning semester,” Ison said. “I don’t know that it will look exactly the same next year when we teach it again, but that’s what I’m excited for. To see how it goes and what the kids learn.”
Straatman supports Gonzalez and Ison in taking the classes in their own direction.
“The beauty of being a teacher is that you get to put your own spin on it,” Straatman said. “You get to find creative ways to present information, but it’s still all the same information in terms of standards.”
Although Christensen will be missed, the school looks forward to seeing how Gonzalez and Ison will teach these classes.
“I think it’s been a goal of our school to build up our computer science program,” Straatman said, “and I think this is a step in moving forward and building that.”
