At San Bernardino High school we have a lot of great teachers, but today we are going to focus more on Mrs. Somers. Mrs. Somers is a 9th/10th grade English teacher at SBHS. She started teaching in 2005 because her daughter was struggling in school. Mrs. Somers was pregnant at the time, thinking that her kids were going to need extra help and that her daughter needed good or better support seeing that she didn’t have much. She also had cancer and wanted to change her life due to that. So she got her reading credential and started teaching.

She originally started teaching at Golden Valley Middle School and taught there for 15 years. Although she loved Golden Valley so much, she always wanted to teach high school. She always felt a connection with older students but she took what was available at the time. She started teaching at SBHS in January of 2020 and she had a few months teaching from the classroom before we went virtual.

Mrs. Somers’ favorite things about teaching are when students understand something, when they turn in an assignment and she learns something from them, and when she’s blown away from what the students have learned from her. When she gets stressed, it makes her think “what am I not doing that is making them act up?” “What can I do to help this student be successful?”

The biggest skill she likes to work with students on is becoming a better writer because when she was a student in high school she was a terrible writer and had to go to the writing center a lot. She always had to show her papers to friends of her daughters who were in college or high school. Mrs Somers said that she will never stop teaching to do any other job. When she sets her mind on something, that’s all she wants. She loves San Bernardino High School because she loves the staff, the students, and the principal. She is thankful that she took a chance on her last year.

Some things that Mrs. Somers students love about her is she is very nice, very calm when she talks to her students and doesn’t yell; she’s patient and cares for her students. She offers to tutor those who are behind and tries to make class more entertaining.

“I like her as a teacher because she is not one of those quick-to-anger teachers and is really nice,” Leo Chavez-Aguilar, 10, said. “We still have opportunities to turn in late assignments before the end of the semester.”

Christian Palacios, 10, said, “She is helpful because she really helps me a lot to bring up my grade and I thank her for that.”

The way she teaches her lessons and can allow students to express what they feel and be able to crack jokes every once and a while.

Rikou Rollando Sasser, a 9th-grade student said, ” I like Mrs. Somers as a teacher, she is really nice, straightforward and very thoughtful of her students. She goes out of her way to make it easy and fun.”

Students also appreciate that she’s always happy and that she gives little assignments while explaining things in a way that is easy for everyone to understand.

Some words that her students would use to describe her are caring, motivated, understanding, amazing, nice, cool, unique, calm, helpful, kind, dedicated, extraordinary, mentor, happy, great, awsome.

Roger Perez, another 9th-grade student, said, ” The best thing about Mrs. Somers is that she always interacts with students at the start of class.”

“I love Mrs. Somers. She is a sweet teacher, she is patient with us and explains everything amazingly, she is one of the best teachers,” Luna Ximena Ochoa Valera, who is also a student of Mrs. Somers, said. “In my opinion, the best thing about Mrs. Somers is that she is respectful and responsible, she doesn’t make all the work hard, she tries to make us understand.”

“The best thing about her is that she takes the time to work with us after school and does her best to help us,” Raven Solar, a 10th-grade student of Mrs. Somers said. “I feel I’ve made a connection with her, even though I don’t talk very much, I believe that she would be a good person to come to if I need anything.”