Elizabeth Cala has been teaching both German 1 and 2 for the past 11 years and counting here at BHS. Cala is a kind and helpful teacher who tries to make learning a whole new language easier and more fun for each of her students.
When it comes to teaching, Cala has always enjoyed the idea of getting in the classroom. From a relatively young age she had planned to be a teacher. “When I was younger, I think I wanted to be an elementary school teacher,” Cala said. But she is glad she didn’t work as an elementary teacher. “I don’t have the energy for elementary school students. I also thought about doing some other things but nothing really struck me outside of teaching,” Cala said.
Cala has also wanted to live in Germany in the past, to go alongside her career. But now that she has a family, it’s not an easy thing to do. “Having a family, it would be really hard to uproot and move overseas for any length of time,” Cala said. However, she still hopes to visit Germany in the future again.
When going into teaching, Cala thought “it would be fun to be a teacher. I thought that I would have summers free and that everyone who took my class would really enjoy it and love it,” Cala said, “And I really enjoyed German in high school and wanted to make sure I kept that skill up.”
When it comes to her plans, Cala said she intends on “being a career teacher.” A career teacher is making teaching the only job you do until retirement.
But she doesn’t want to be putting all or even most of her time into teaching and schoolwork. “I would like to focus more on family next year. And I’m hopeful that by having done so much work for this year here, that I can maybe focus on some of those outside of school things next year,” Cala said.
She does plan to make some changes for next year so not everything will be out of school. “I would like to change and add into the fall semester curriculum. So, work things around a little bit. Yeah, not a ton of new things, but maybe placing things in a different spot than where they used to be,” Cala said.
