PHS Spotlight Ms. Carrillo
As you all may or may not know, this school year, we have a new Activities Director with us. This is an excellent opportunity to introduce Ms. Gina Carrillo as Parlier High School’s own Leadership Teacher. After reading this article, you will learn all that you need to know about this extraordinary teacher. I am introducing her by asking a few simple questions about her and her position in our school.
I started by asking how many years she’s been teaching here at Parlier High School, as mentioned earlier, she is very excited to begin her first year at PHS. Going into my next question I followed up by asking her what subjects she is teaching. She teaches the Leadership Class and is the Activities Director. That means she is responsible for all of the fun things that we have done here at PHS these last few weeks and the ones to come.
During the middle portion of my interview, I started getting into the harder hitting questions. For instance, how many years of schooling did it take her to become a teacher? To which she answered that she did four years through the University of California system to earn her Bachelor’s degree and then went on another year for her Master’s degree.
Students may wonder if our teachers had an outlook for teaching or if it was their first option to be one. To my surprise no, it wasn’t Ms. Carrillo’s first option, although it was always in the back of her mind when she was little. She officially changed her mind when she was graduating high school. Her goals were set on becoming a school counselor, and then, as she became a Substitute Teacher and realized that becoming a teacher was her true calling; she decided to go down that route.
Further, in order to get to know her a little bit better, she expressed that her favorite hobbies are playing softball, and cheer. She likes to travel but loves playing sports. If you think about it, grading could be very daunting especially when there is at least 28 to 30 pages for all 7 periods; it seems like so much! However, according to Ms. Carrillo, she loves grading, especially when it comes to her Motivational Mondays (Motivational Mondays are when Ms. Carillo plays a motivational video that may inspire students, therefore, students have to write an outlook they gained from the video). She loves seeing the responses her students have to ensure motivation reaches out to them. Even so, grading for her can be also be “hit or miss” sometimes.
Importantly, Ms. Carillo plans on staying at Parlier High School for as long as she can. She plans on teaching until she retires. She loves this position she is in, and she sees herself in it until retirement comes. Her goals for our school are to implement what we didn’t get to do last year and motivate students to have a better outlook in their community and in Parlier High School.
Lastly, the advice she’d give to all of the students that may be having a hard time is to always think positively because, “If you always think in the positive, positivity will come. There is a lot of negativity in the world, but if you at least wake up in the morning and tell yourself one good thing..then, you will have already changed your day.”
