Jan 2018: Teacher Feature | Straight out of middle school

Ms. Diane Halsey was a teacher at Grange Middle School for 14 years, but this is her first year teaching at Armijo She teaches Introduction to Engineering and Principles of Engineering, two subjects that are not always easy to teach. She generally works from what the students know and don’t know, so some have an easier time than others, and she grades theme based on how much they learn, not on what they know.

Working as a teacher is Ms. Halsey’s second career; her first career was being an aircraft maintenance technician. She had wanted to be a teacher when she was younger but then “realized teaching would not pay” her bills so she “became a mechanic and bought a house” and her cars and now she teaches. The best part of her job this year is getting to teach seniors that she had originally taught when they were seventh and eighth graders.

Some of the things she notices about her students is that her seniors tend to pick a field of study that has to do with Electrical or Mechanical Engineering. “That’s solid base in their experiences in the past; they learned how to use tools they never used before,” she said. Her students get motivated by their excitement and doing the things they’re learning. “A lot of students are intrigued by learning the basics and then taking that basics and knowledge and expanding it to a project or a robot or to an electrical component,” she said.

She advises that sophomores and juniors start thinking about their essays and college applications early so they don’t get to struggle at the last minute.

To get where she is today, Ms. Halsey attended several colleges. She went to a college of aeronautics in New York where she got an Associate’s in Avionics Technician and a Bachelor’s in Aircraft Maintenance Technology. She also went to UC Davis for a Master’s and Credentials program. She studied real estate and liberal arts at Solano Community College and earned a pre-MBA at San Jose State. She also studied Business at Skyline Community College.

The thing that she enjoys the most about Armijo is the students. She enjoys her new working environment, her colleagues, and her students because those are the things and people that make coming to work fun. She said that, if she was given the opportunity to change something about Armijo, it would be “class sizes, especially for shop classes because there’s so much equipment and tools that people have to learn how to use and when the classes are to big students are off-task and doing things that could get them into trouble.”

But not everything for Ms. Halsey is about school and work. She enjoys backpacking, camping, fishing, and traveling. She also tries to go to at least five National Parks a year. This summer, she’s planning on taking a 28-day backpacking trip on the John Muir Trail.

One more interesting thing about Ms. Halsey? She was born and raised on the Island of Trinidad.