Alumni remain loyal tornadoes

Here are some faculty members who attended Hoover as students.

By: Alejandra Rosas

After four years of stressful studies, extracurricular activities, and all the wonderful things high school has to offer, many students are ecstatic to graduate and never look back. However, some of the teachers on campus were once Hoover students themselves, and have come back to the place where their futures began. But what made them want to come back?

Angers

Advanced via Individual Determination, English, and French teacher Kathy Angers was once a student here and is now a teacher.
According to Angers, she was a very productive and hard-working student in high school, involved with many activities such as the Latin club, the drill team and Associated Student Body (ASB).
Even as a high school student, Angers already knew that she wanted to pursue a career in teaching. However, she did not necessarily see herself teaching at the very school from which she graduated.
According to Angers, at the time in which she was in need for a job, the school needed a French teacher leaving it all to be very “synchronous.”
“I just love learning. I love teaching. I love everything about it,” Angers said.
Angers claims that her favorite memory about being in high school is that of her and her friends always paying attention to the leaves of the trees in the lower quad changing color in the fall.
“The leaves changing color make me reminiscent of the old days,” Angers said.

Social science teacher Donald Ashman was Angers’ former Latin teacher when she was a student here. According to Ashman, Angers was “one of those students who made you feel like teaching was worthwhile.”

Surprisingly, Ashman claims that having her as a student and now a co-worker is not weird at all, but rather “rewarding” and wonderful.

Stepanyan

Social science teacher and ASB Director Edgar Melik-Stepanyan, who is one of the newest teachers at the school, always wanted to be a teacher. He especially had Hoover in mind as the “second home” he would be working at after he graduated in 2000.
While being a high school student, Stepanyan was very dedicated to his journalism class and basketball team.
Stepanyan’s favorite memory of high school was his senior BGD when everyone was going “crazy” ready to win the bell.
Soon after high school, Stepanyan decided to continue his passion for writing by working for the Glendale News Press along with continuing his social science major at USC.
Later on Stepanyan began to teach social science and was ASB director at Toll Middle School hoping that it would not be too long until the day he would be working on campus.
“Hoover is one of the places where I know I can make a difference in students’ lives the same way my teachers and mentors made a difference in mine,” Stepanyan said.

Although there are a lot of things that have not changed at Hoover, there are also many that are not like they once were when these teachers were students here.

For example, students today create a mesh of different racial groups “hanging out” together but when these teachers were here, there seemed to be more segregation between students and definitely a larger amount of cliques
During his time as a student, Stepanyan remembers the stabbing of Raul Aguirre in 2000 due to the strong conflicts and racial tensions between Armenians and Latinos.

He claims that he is glad to see that since then, racial tensions have seemed to decrease by a vast amount and students of almost every culture have become intermixed.

Van Patten

As a student, social science teacher, athletic director, and basketball coach, John Van Patten was very dedicated to his academics and the basketball team, which he began to coach after high school.
Van Patten’s favorite memories of high school are completely filled with basketball games into which he put so much time, effort and passion.
Like Angers, Van Patten had an interest in teaching while still in high school. Not long after graduating, he was certified as a social science teacher, and while looking for employment, the GUSD needed teachers at the school, so he took the opportunity as he felt “comfortable to work here.”
He claims that at the time in which he attended the school, the campus was much cleaner than it is now. Back then, students seemed to have taken the importance of keeping the campus clean much more seriously than students do now.

The methods teachers and administrators use to guide students into the right path also have changed. According to Van Patten, teachers and administrators today put more of an effort to make sure students “do their best” and succeed much higher.

The wonderful high school experience that they had as teenagers contributed to them wanting and enjoying working at Hoover, and they want to be a part of making students’ high school experiences wonderful.
Being a student on this campus was definitely memorable for them and coming back to work here is something they never regret.