This past summer several Roseville High School teachers traveled over various parts of the world in order to add personal experience to their own subject fields.

Drama teacher Ashley White traveled to a teachers workshop in New York in order to help strengthen the drama program here at RHS. White partook in a teachers’ conference through a program called Broadway Teachers Workshop, led by well known actors and broadway directors: such as Leslie Odom Jr, an actor who is currently starring in Hamilton.

She also had the opportunity to see four broadway plays over her three days in New York: including Hamilton, Shuffle Along, On Your Feet and Fun Home.

According to White, the amount of support the directors provided their actors in these productions inspired her to apply this into her own productions.

“I felt like I came out of it with a wealth of knowledge from seeing all the production. It’s inspiring and I take notes after every show,” White said. “I want to take what they do and take their techniques and their activities in the way they direct their actors and bring that here to [the] Roseville High Theater company.”

According to RHS sophomore drama student AJ Welker, White’s changes to the program this year brings a new atmosphere to the JB Gale theater.

“She’s brought back a lot of useful skills and some really good resources, like people to contact for those of us who are pursuing college,” Welker said.

Art History teacher, Patricia Leong, enrolled in Art History classes over the summer to gain experience in order to strengthen her curriculum. Leong completed twelve units of art history through online courses, as well as enrolling at Sierra College and the University of California, San Diego.

According to Leong, some of the classes she enrolled in at the universities were actually easier than the ones she currently teaches here at RHS.

“It was kind of exciting to see how the colleges were offering the same course that I was teaching in high school,” Leong said. “It was also exciting to see how rigorous we were in the high school classes, more so than some of the college classes.”

Leong found the classes to be stressful and hopes to teach her students in a way that will decrease the students’ amount of stress.

“It was definitely stressful and it helped me remember to make sure the students have some sort of balance in the class and that I don’t just give them too much coursework,” Leong said.

RHS junior and AP Art History student Jacob Watson has noticed changes to Leong’s classroom as a result of her participation in Art History courses over the summer.

“She’s able to understand the student struggle because she was a student of the class,” Watson said. “She understands our struggles and can be sympathetic towards that.”

Spanish teacher Maria Pitts spent three weeks of her summer traveling all throughout Europe in the hopes to help gain experience that she could apply to her classroom. Pitts and her family traveled to Iceland, London, Northern Spain and Paris in the hopes to pass her love for traveling not only to her own children, but to her students as well.

She travels to Europe every few years in order to visit her family in in Spain.  Pitts took the opportunity to teach her children about their spanish roots as well as allow them to get to know their relatives.  

“My husband and I enjoy traveling and want to pass that gift onto our children,” said Pitts. “I want my children to get to know the relatives we have in Spain and learn more about their roots.”

Pitts hopes to take her experience in Europe and apply that into her classroom. Pitts wants to take her stories about Spain and inform her classroom of her cultural perspective and history, in order to entice them to travel.

This school year Pitts plans on taking her experience in Europe and incorporating that into her class. She plans on doing that by taking the new found knowledge of Spain’s culture and informing her students of it.

“I was immersed in the language and culture which makes me a better speaker as well and it helping me to share the culture I also like to share the pictures I took as writing and speaking prompts,” Pitts said.