When students are in school, there are many components to having a good day, week, month, or year. For some, having friends in your classes can help. For others, having a good teacher is the best. One teacher that comes to LFHS students’ minds is Mrs. Melissa Halkias.
Halkias has been a teacher at LFHS for eight years. She has taught classes like English 1, English 3, speech, and world fiction. She has a love for all her classes because they all have different personalities.
Halkias enjoys assigning creative projects to each of her classes to get them out of their comfort zone. For English 1, she gives a project based on the graphic novel Maus. In this project, students interview a family member about their legacy and how they want to share that story. They can choose from writing a feature or taking on a perspective of their own point of view in a diary.
For the senior elective speech course, Halkias has a performance based project where the students have to come up with, or resell, a product. This helps kids get out of their comfort zone and be very creative. Students have to make a product and sell it while also getting feedback from teachers and students.
“Speech is unlike any class I have taught before, but I learned so much and had so much fun teaching it,” Halkias said.
For the start of our 24-25 school year, Halkias was out on maternity leave. She planned to take the first semester off then come back for the second semester. Preparing for her first kid was not easy but with so many amazing and helpful family and staff members, she had a more manageable time.
“I didn’t know what to expect initially. But, I ended up finding a community of family, friends, and teachers that had amazing advice,” Halkias said.
For the first semester while she was away, LFHS co-teacher Mr. Moore was a huge help in keeping track of the class and the work students needed to get done. Before Halkias left, she and Moore planned a series of great lessons that felt very comfortable for students.
Coming back to school was much easier than Halkias expected. Currently, she is adjusting well and feels like she never even left as it was different coming in halfway through the year instead of at the very beginning. Her transition overall has been really good and she is happy and ready to be back.
