Tharp said the teaching field was an easy decision for her to make as her career choice.
“Becoming a teacher was a dream job for me,” she said. “I get to continue to study and learn and to revel in my love of language and literature, and also teach from the heart, inspiring students with my passion. Each year, I pore through textbooks, literature I’ve recently read or always loved, and my files of ideas from each summer, searching for the perfect materials for my class. As I prepare my syllabus for the new school year, I strive to reinvent myself and my class to create the context of an academic interest I wish to explore, or a current social situation I wish to expand. However, my approach to teaching is always marked by the myriad complexities of teaching students to think in and interact with the academic world through both its literature and its rhetoric and my singular mission, to allow students the opportunity to acquire the skills needed to participate in the discourse of society with a voice that will be heard, and to empower them to exercise it. In teaching students to enter the conversations of our society, I teach my course around the central idea of discovering and creating the American identity around the abstraction of the American Dream.“
Picture Information
Weatherford High School Campus Teacher of the Year and WISD Secondary Teacher of the Year Staci Tharp (left) and Weatherford ISD Education Foundation Past-President Donna Dickinson (photo by DERIK MOORE).