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Nora Sanchez Najera |
Hello! My name is Nora Sanchez and I am a high school English teacher with BISD. I studied at the University of Texas at Brownsville where I received my bachelor's degree in English and an almost double-major in Art, but wanting to graduate sooner than later, I kept a hefty list of art courses as electives instead.
After my first year of teaching high school English language arts classes, I began taking library information courses at Texas Womans University. A year and a half of graduate classes later, I earned my master's degree in Library Information Science, however, I was not quite ready to transition into the library.
[updated 2017]
I transferred over to IDEA Public Schools after four years of teaching high school students to begin a new journey teaching Reading and Writing to 7th graders - a challenge indeed, but I met it head-on, earning IDEA's Teacher of the Year Award that first year. After teaching there for three years, I decided my work as a classroom English teacher was done, and I was ready to make a difference in the library.
I then began working with BISD as an elementary librarian, and although my goal had always been to work in at the high school level, I took the challenge of working with the wee-ones. Upon entering the library classroom in 2010, I took on the non-traditional role of librarian. I started my library classes with a short lesson and fun activities and afterward, students checked out books. After my first year, I decided to begin to reform the system that was already in place by challenging students to read their books since most of them were checking out books for the sake of checking out and very few were actually reading. This was not an overnight change. It took several grants and lots of free new books later to really peak students' interest. I began weeding our collection, getting rid of almost 50% of our outdated books, some dating all the way back to 1900--really.
Accelerated Reader was also a system in much need of reform. By individualizing students' AR goals to match their comprehension levels, reading suddenly became more attainable to them. Each year I had more and more students reach their AR goals both in points and proficiency so that after my 6th year at our school, our campus earned 3rd place in the district as far as reading comprehension goes. On my 7th year, we accomplished 1st place in the district, and this year we are still at 1st place. Our students have completely changed the way they see reading. Behavior problems are minimal at the library for the very reason that even the students that have behavioral issues love to read, and they dare not risk losing their library privileges by misbehaving.
I started teaching thinking that my love for literature was enough to get me through the hard days, but I soon learned
that first year was that the most important thing to love was not literature itself but those I was teaching. This got me through every hurdle and seemingly impossible task, knowing that everyone deserved to learn, to grow, and to feel capable of achieving even what some have told them they never could.