Wolcott’s new cot
Timothy Wolcott standing at his teaching podium (The Puma Prensa / Wyett Pinney)
By Wyett Pinney, Photo Editor
Maria Carrillo High School was fortunate enough to bring in more staff members this year. Among the new staff, there is MCHS’s newest English teacher Timothy Wolcott!
Wolcott is an experienced teacher, having taught at both San Francisco State University and the University of San Francisco. At USF he taught French and at SFSU he taught communications, combining roughly into 15 years of teaching experience where he taught high level academic writing.
When asked why he became a teacher he said, “I loved learning as a student, and it was the teachers that made the difference.” This is something he tries to replicate in his own teaching in his academic freshmen English classes at Carrillo. He also credits both his father and step-mother, who were teachers, as inspirations for his career choice as well as his PhD chair at UC Berkeley, Claire Kramsch, for her ability to take language theory and apply it to modern social and political issues.
Among all aspects of his teaching, the one that he hopes that his students get to see the most is his passion. He said, “I can’t teach a subject I don’t enjoy.” Making it fun is what makes it worth teaching and it’s something he wants his students to pick up on as they take his class. It helps that English already happens to be a fun subject to him, but he is still putting in the effort to make sure that it’s just as interesting to his students as it is to him. He always manages to have an endlessly positive attitude.
He expressed a lot of excitement for the freshman English curriculum saying that “The Global Perspective Core, is really cool. I’m still figuring it out, but the potential of it is amazing,” he said of the freshman curriculum that combines Humanities and English along with a number of projects that require exploring different cultures. He has some hopes for future changes he would make to the program if he could, such as more joint projects between the two classes or matching the class rosters so that the same students are in matching humanities and English classes. This is the first year in Carrillo history where students were pooled together and put with matching English and humanities.
Coming to Carrillo brought with it some surprises for Wolcott, as he said he was surprised at the amount of spirit. “Back at my high school, it felt like nobody ever went to any of the games. But it feels like everyone really cares here,” he said in terms of both the quality of the events and the attendance. He also expressed surprise over how important the art programs are to Carrillo, with the wide variety ranging from the music, ceramics, drama and more.
Hopefully, given a number of years on campus, Wolcott can make the positive changes he hopes to see, and use his years of experience to welcome freshmen onto campus for the foreseeable future.