Recently, the Sightline Staff had the pleasure of interviewing a new staff member, Michael Walker. During the interview, we got to know him a little better on a professional level as well as personally. So through this article, we will hope to share a bit more of that with the Bethany community.
Background information
Michael is originally from Archbold, Ohio, and graduated from Goshen College in 2017. When asked why Goshen was his college of choice, he talked about how Goshen had one of the best communications departments available and at the time of entering college, he was considering going into journalism. The teaching program at Goshen also stood out to him because he was able to learn inside of a real classroom within the first year. This is something that typically only happens by a student’s junior year, so this opportunity was a major benefit of the program. Some other things that drew him to Goshen were the baseball team he was able to be a part of, as well as the fact that Goshen was the college that his mother graduated from, so “it was at least a requirement to check it out.”
Connection to Bethany
Michael was hired right out of college to teach at Tinora High School, which is only about a 15 minute drive from his hometown. He taught there for four years before coming to Bethany for the 2021-22 school year. When asked about his connection to Bethany and what brought him here, Michael talked about his many friends from college who had attended Bethany in high school, which left a good impression of the school on him. In fact, for one year of college, Michael was roommates with Tim Lehman’s son!
School Year so Far
Michael is teaching freshman and sophomore English this year, as well as being head of the WIT staff. He has experience leading a yearbook staff from his previous years of teaching, but he admitted that he isn’t exactly familiar with the program that Bethany WIT uses, so he is learning alongside the students on how to best put it to use. When asked about how the year was going teaching-wise, Michael was excited to talk about how he prefers to teach students in a more project-based system of learning rather than constantly throwing tests at them. One project that the students were especially excited to work on was creating comic strips based off of a story that they had read in class. This project was used to get them more familiar with the plot of the story and able to use Freytag’s pyramid, also known as the plot mountain.
Hobbies
When asked about his hobbies, Michael talked about his enjoyment of following sports, stating that he’s a fan of “basically every Cleveland team,” as well as Ohio State. He likes to play video games, specifically MLB the Show, a baseball game that is able to simulate the sport he loves. He also talked about his dog Tito, named after Cleveland Indians manager Terry Francona, who has that as a nickname. Michael’s dog is a pitbull-lab mix, and he said that he spends a good portion of his time entertaining him.