SDA has recently gone through a change of teachers and has added many new ones for multiple different subjects. One of these new teachers includes a new English nine teacher, Ellen diCristina, who went to school to at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo to major in English. This will be her ninth year teaching at somewhere different than Cal Poly, which she taught at for 8 years.

She was drawn to teaching English because she has a strong passion for reading, poetry, and literary expressions. Her goal as a new SDA teacher is to embody the free spirited culture and expression that she has heard about from students and fellow staff. She decided to teach at SDA over other schools because she heard about this reputation of being open-minded and expressive.

Her first impressions of SDA have been only positive. She finds the students to be super nice, fun, friendly, and overwhelmingly respectful to her, being a new teacher on campus.

She is also most of all excited, to be a part of the staff athletic events that happen here on campus. diCristina will definitely fit right into the culture because when she was in high school she was having fun being in different groups, challenging herself academically, and being in soccer and band much like the majority of SDA students.

But like any other teacher, diCristina sometimes has teacher anxiety dreams where she has slept in too late and missed class, has no lesson plan for the day, and kids were lighting things in her classroom on fire.

In her free time her number one hobby is to read at the beach. Her pet peeve in life is that she always needs things to be straight and lined up and everything needs to be organized.

She also has a hilarious side to her because if she were on “American Idol” she would audition with the song, “Baby Got Back,” because she claims it to be “lyrical genius.” Also, if she were in a movie, she said it would be titled, “Really?” and she would be played as either Kristen Wig or Tina Fey. She also said that her favorite food is spicy Thai food and that captures her personal adventurous side.