With over ten years of experience in the English Department, Tia Johnston has come to teach our 9th-grade students all about her love for books. She’s read 45 books to be exact… this year.

Johnston will be a great addition to our staff at Bullitt East, with a great passion and a strong will to teach, and most importantly, a lot of books that she’s read. She’s ready to get a jump at a fresh start at a new school with new faces.

Johnston’s passion for reading came at a really young age. “Whenever I was little, I remember coming home from kindergarten and teaching my baby brothers how to read. And so it really started from there… I loved helping my teachers, and I read all the time… So I just kind of blossomed from there.” Johnston said.

 A mixture of helping people out and her love for reading became the catalyst for her journey in becoming an English teacher.

As Johnston got older, her passion for teaching only grew stronger and of course, her love for reading grew as well. Her favorite book is The Great Gatsby, “and it’s the funniest book to teach. I love it.” Johnston said. 

Johnston’s love for books is way more than just having a little free time to spend sitting down but the feeling of how the story drags you in and makes you feel as if you’re a part of it. “I love being able to be in somebody else’s shoes like I think reading is the best thing to help people start to have empathy for other people, because you get to live these lives that you’ll never get to live in real life, and doing that lets you empathize with other people, understand where they’re coming from, and I think that helps make the world a better place,” Johnston said

Being able to connect with other people and their life stories, and having an understanding of how to help someone, is how Johnston started her journey as a teacher. Having patience and empathy for others, and helping them whenever they’re struggling or in need of help, is just who Johnston is.

“Whenever I was in grad school for teaching. In particular, I worked in the Writing Center as a writing tutor, and it was then, whenever I was actually working one on one with people that I realized like, how wonderful, honestly, it felt to actually see somebody like get something like, to see the light bulb turn on, and helping people get to that is what made me kind of detour from just English and literature to teaching.” Johnston said.

Johnston gave some advice for the people who are inspired writers/authors or even future English teachers: “Don’t be afraid to let your first draft suck. Like, I think so many people have writer’s block because they want it to be perfect when they put it on the page. But one of my favorite things to tell students, to tell, like my friends who write, is just get it all down there, and once it’s on the page, you actually have something to work from. It’s better to have, like a terrible paragraph on the page than it is to have a beautiful paragraph that’s not like going anywhere, because it’s just in your head.” Johnston said.

Even if you aren’t an inspired writer or you think that you aren’t interested in reading or even English, Johnston tries to make all of her work relevant to her students, to pull them in, and make her classroom more interesting, and make her students excited to walk into her classroom every day. “I sing half the time when I’m teaching, like I’m bouncing everywhere, because I want it to be fun for them, and I want them to take that throughout their lives and not be like, Oh, I don’t want to do this, but see it as an opportunity to do something new,” Johnston said.

Ultimately, Johnston will be a great addition to the Charger Nation and bring more joy and make students want to come to school every day. “I think my biggest thing is just approaching things in a fun way, where you’re able to be curious, you’re able to make mistakes, and you’re able to come out of it, learning something,” Johnston said