This year St. Louis welcomes Megan Stowell as a new English teacher. She grew up in the Metro-Detroit area, and then she began studying at Central Michigan University. She graduated from college and started teaching in 2014. After she graduated from college, she taught in California for around a year. Then she decided she wanted to live in Michigan as she remarked, “When I moved back I took a job at a really small school in northern Michigan; I was there for two years before teaching at Big Rapids for two years. I decided to move jobs because I live in the mid-Michigan area, and the commute was getting really difficult.” 

Ms. Stowell then started looking for job opportunities closer to where she lived and claimed, “When I met the staff at St. Louis, they were extremely kind and welcoming. I could tell by the way they spoke and from the curriculum they designed that they truly cared about their students, so that solidified for me that this was a school I wanted to be part of.”

Skylar Rodriguez stated, “I think the new teachers in the school are going to benefit our learrning, and I hope that they will fit in well at St. Louis High School.”

Unquestionably, Stowell knew she wanted to start teaching in her freshman year of high school, as she stated, “My 9th grade English teacher taught seniors, and one day a senior left behind the guidelines for a time capsule project they had to do. I asked her about it and thought ‘Wow that is so cool! I want to do that with students someday’. Before that moment I hadn’t thought about being a teacher since I was seven years old, but at that moment, I knew I wanted to teach.” 

Chloé Baxter shared, “I’m excited to have a new teacher in our school who has already taught somewhere else, and I hope her experience here is better than anywhere else.”

Something that Ms. Stowell is excited about is being able to teach students the same curriculum and have a different outcome every time. She shared, “I like lesson planning because it makes me feel accomplished, like finishing a jigsaw puzzle. But it is really about how the lessons go in front of the class, and that is all about the students. Everyone brings in their own new perspectives and experiences, which is what fuels our class discussions and makes the class and content interesting.”