Pacifica Stories

At Pacifica, our teachers' curiosity about their subject doesn't take the summer off. It's second nature for them to keep learning and honing their craft, even between school years. For new English faculty member Isa Uggetti Erazo, that meant attending the AP Summer Institute, a College Board-run training for teachers of AP courses, ahead of his first year teaching AP Language and Composition.

Isa joins the Pacifica English Department this year while working on his doctorate in English at USC, where he has also taught for three years. But college freshmen and high school students, it turns out, are not the same audience—a distinction the Summer Institute made clear almost immediately.

"I was eager to attend... to understand how best to prepare students for the AP test during the year, as well as to discuss different approaches to the class with other experienced teachers," he said of his reasons for going. He left with far more than that: a clear sense of what the entire year of AP Language should look like, from the major units and readings down to how assessments should be structured. While he continues to shape individual lessons alongside Pacifica's English faculty, that overall roadmap came largely from the Institute.

The bigger surprise was how different high school composition would be from what he'd taught before. "Before participating in the Summer Institute, I was ready to approach AP Language like an undergraduate course," he said, "but once the seminar began, I quickly gathered from the discussions with other teachers that teaching high school composition would be quite different." Conversations with veteran high school teachers handed him a wealth of resources he didn't know he'd need—readings, lesson plans, even games—that he's already found immensely effective in the classroom this year.

What stayed with him most, though, was the room itself. Many of the teachers attending had been to the Institute multiple times, not because their schools required it, but because they were still chasing ways to improve. "Seeing all these experienced teachers so intent on improving their craft," he said, "I was inspired to keep pursuing more opportunities for professional development myself."