Hawk’s Eye asked these teachers what their high school experience was like along with how they soon came to be a teacher.

 Social media and computers are newer at Olathe East than many assume. FACS teacher Ms.Vohs explained how different OE was when she attended it once as a student.

“It was so different than it is now;  we didn’t have social media. You really didn’t interact with a lot of the other schools,”  she said. Students didn’t have a way of communicating to friends at other schools or even in the class two doors down. Instead of sending a friend a text during school you had to pass notes throughout the class. Current computer rooms were once just normal classrooms. Vohs said, “They would take us into these rooms and would say some days these are going to be computer labs and we were just like what, that many computers in one space?” Eventually the internet came to be and computers popped in everywhere.

School pride was a bigger deal before all the different classes appeared and college became a main focus of many students. Now we have so many choices of classes and it can get pretty confusing. Ms.Taylor, a history teacher here at OE, graduated in 2013 and said, “It’s more academic; I feel like they push more for that rather than school spirits or games”.

Students could not go to any school they wanted to through programs, so showing your school was the best was a bigger deal. Taylor was a part of the swim team during her time here. Along with school pride the school was much smaller than it was now. Ms.Sellers, our art teacher here at East, attended when there was only grades ten through twelve. The building was smaller and had to built onto when they changed it by adding ninth grade.

Every student has that one class that is their favorite out of the rest. Taylor said, “My favorite part of high school was taking Voh’s studio classes and it was fun because I liked the content. I liked the fashion aspect of it and all my friends were in it to, so I got to spend a lot of hours with them.” Vohs had Taylor as her student and enjoys making her classroom one of the many that students love to attend. Vohs explained why she wanted to teach fashion apparel for the reason of students being able to choose to take it because they want to. She wants them to be able to come to class and be excited about it. Many people love to teach because they have the opportunity to come back and inspire kids and really push them.

 Many don’t know what they want to be when they get older until it’s already time to pick a college. Not for these teachers. Sellers did not at first want to become a teacher, she said “I kind of rebelled against being a teacher- my mom’s a teacher, my dad’s in education now, my older sister was in college to be a teacher. I felt like I was surrounded by teachers, so I wanted to do something different”. Before Ms.Sellers wanted to become a teacher, she was a soccer coach for the Blue Valley Soccer Club. She was teaching Pre-K through second grade and realized she really enjoyed being around younger kids. The story is different for Ms.Vohs and Ms.Taylor, both had wanted to become a teacher since their early childhood. Taylor wanted to originally teach younger grades, but as she got older she realized that she would love to teach high school instead. Vohs however wanted to be a teacher in the grade she was currently in. Eventually when she got to high school she knew she wanted to be a high school teacher. She reasoned that because “I think that when kids go off to college, it’s their high school teachers they remember the most or connect with the most”. The connection between student and teacher is sometimes their favorite parts of their jobs.

Taylor from the beginning wanted to come back and teach for OE. When she graduated from college, she kept pushing her name in, trying to get a teaching position here. She said, “I had a family friend that was one of the social studies and he was retiring soon, so it just happened to work out.” Eventually she got booked for an interview. Soon after she ended up being offered the position of being a history teacher. The teachers here inspired Sellers so much that she wanted to come back and teach for the district. She originally started teaching at Olathe South, but when a position opened up at OE she decided it would be great to come back and teach. Voh’s position here just came to her. She was wanting another job at another school, but when she found out there was one here. she thought “why not”. They all one way or another decided to return and teach in the school where they had an amazing experience.