New faces and needed adjustments appear as three new teachers are introduced to the staff at the beginning of the second semester.

“I’ve wanted to be a teacher ever since I was in the second grade and saw that my grandma had taught for 30 years,” Spanish teacher Britney Lucus said. “I guess you could say that she had influenced me. I was grading papers for her when I realized I could teach too.”

Lucus was a student teacher in Abilene for two years before moving to Wichita Falls. And even then, she had a passion for Spanish.

“I lived in Uruguay, and while my entire family spoke Spanish, I never got to learn it because they didn’t teach me,” Lucus said. “When I got to college, I knew that I wanted to be a teacher, but I didn’t know what I wanted to teach. I went on a study abroad program to South America and I lived in Uruguay for a couple of months. I really picked up on the language and decided that I wanted to teach it to other people.”

Lucus considers herself “a laid-back teacher” as long as the students are on task, paying attention and doing their work.

“It’s definitely an adjustment that I’m taking over at the second semester,”Lucus said. “It’s an adjustment for the teacher as well as the students. I think they were showing me that they are adjusting well when I saw that their test grades are getting better and their quiz grades are good.”

Lucus thinks the staff “feels like a big family”.

“I love my coworkers; I eat lunch with a lot of the other teachers, and I love them to death, I’m so happy to be here,” Lucus said. “I was scared that they would be different from my past coworkers. They are different in a good way. We get along well and have the same sense of humor.”

Physics teacher Mr. Baskin returned to teach physics after leaving about 12 years ago.

“Teaching here again is surreal, coming to teach in the same classroom after being out of it,” Baskin said. “Everything is about the same as where I left. It just feels normal.”

Baskin said that he saw “better students at Rider than most smaller colleges.”

“There are two reasons I became a teacher,” Baskin said. “One is that I felt there was no other place to make a bigger difference than in the classroom. I realized at college that I wanted to teach, and I soon realized that at Rider, I got to work with the best and the brightest.”

Baskin’s belief is that students understand the subject when they have to teach the material and when they’re working together and sharing information rather than listening to a lecture.

“I teach by giving my students some background information and helping them to understand some abstruse concepts,” Baskin said. “Then they do what I call recitations, where it is them presenting the material to each other.”

Bilingual teacher’s aide Laura Nuñez helps teach English to non-native speakers.

“I became a teacher’s aide because I enjoy helping the students succeed,” Nuñez said. “I went to Midwestern State University for three years in bilingual education with a focus to help students be able to speak English and I haven’t finished. That’s why I got a job here.”

Nuñez doesn’t have a set teaching style, but she said she learns the best way for the student to retain information and uses that method to teach them.

“When I first arrived, they would just walk in and look at me,” she said. “Now they are comfortable enough to share their problems with me. My favorite thing about teaching students English is the moment when they learn something new, the look on their face is a reward to me.”