Freshman Biology teacher Ellen Schuster is a new addition to the cherished Tosa West teaching staff for the 2024-2025 school year. Though she may have just gotten here, she’s comparatively experienced in teaching with 7 previous years of teaching at Rufus King High School in Milwaukee. As Ms. Schuster navigates through her first semester of working here with her 5 biology classes, a few questions have been garnered in wonder.
What does a typical school day look like for you?
I try to get here around 7:10-ish. I like to get here early because I get good work time in. I teach all day, eat with the science department, and then I normally leave around four.
Where did you go to high school? What kind of student were you?
I went to a high school in Pennsylvania, since I’m not from here. I was a quiet student, and I was preppy. Try hard sounds mean, but I was a try hard. The friends I had around me were really smart and took a lot of AP classes, so it really pushed me to work harder too.
What was cool when you were in high school?
When I was a senior, there was this trend for high schools across the country where people were doing lip-dubs, so a lot of people were basically doing music videos. And, our school decided to lip sync to a music video too, which got put on Youtube. I think that was pretty funny.
What do you find surprising now about highschoolers?
Just, like, how information is so readily available now to students that wasn’t available when I was in high school. It’s more ubiquitous now. Probably because of social media.
What do you think your students would be surprised to learn about you?
I really like teaching freshmen. A lot of students usually ask me, “Oh, don’t you hate teaching freshmen?” and I have taught other students, but I do like teaching freshmen. I also like that I have 5 biology classes [of the same grade] because when I teach the same lesson I’m practicing, and I start to get better at it as the day goes on. After you teach something for the first time, you start to notice how students respond to the lesson, what confuses them or how to address their misconceptions. If they don’t understand a vocabulary term, or if I need to spend more time on one part of the lesson. Plus, freshmen are new to high school so they’re kind of a blank canvas, they don’t experience the same almost ‘jaded-ness’ about high school that upperclassmen may get.
If you could join any other teacher’s class, which would it be and why?
I think it would be very fun to join Miss Tess’ astronomy class, because that’s an area of science that I don’t know a whole lot about. Also, space is cool.
What surprised you most when you came to Tosa West? Why?
Okay, not completely *surprising,* but something that I really appreciate about Tosa West is how diverse student interests are. There are different classes students take, clubs students can join… Just by asking students, you learn they have many different personal interests.
What is your favorite school subject? (If science/bio, what beyond them?)
Besides biology, and I really do like biology, I like history. I really enjoy US history… My favorite class in highschool was AP US History. I only started to really like Biology after I graduated high school.
How has your experience here been so far?
I really like the biology classes here, and I really like the curriculum [OpenSciEd]. The curriculum is new, and gets some criticism from students, but ultimately I think it’s helped students get better at certain skills like expressing themselves in model and writing. It’s tough at first, but I think it gets easier.
Though Ms. Schuster doesn’t teach any AP classes currently, “I want to encourage people to take AP science classes. I think students should challenge themselves. It’s high school,” she assured. Be sure to check out the courses offered in our fantastic science department if you’re debating classes. Thanks to Ms. Schuster for allowing the interview to be conducted.
