Crystal Cifuentes is a World Literature and ELD 2 teacher at FHS. This is her second year teaching at FHS and she is a supportive teacher who helps her students learn and navigate their journey throughout high school. Outside of teaching, Cifuentes has many hobbies, such as reading and building Legos. Additionally, she loves to spend time with her dog, Dexter, and going outdoors on walks and hikes together.
“I decided to become a teacher because when I was in high school, I wasn’t a great student,” Cifuentes said. “I definitely had a difficult time learning, and I had one English teacher that really just kind of supported me and helped me find my best way of learning. And when I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do in college, I knew I wanted to help others and to help kids, I just didn’t know how. And so that English teacher kind of just helped me to understand that maybe I could also be a teacher and help students in the great way that he was able to help me.”
Before deciding to become a teacher, she looked into a career early childhood development, and helped out at a preschool while going to community college. Later on while attending San Jose State University, she was inspired by her English professor to pursue becoming an English teacher instead.
Cifuentes first taught at CHS before moving to come teach at FHS, where she found a lot of diversity and a close community of students.
Cifuentes now collaborates with a group of teachers at FHS to create the FITS english curriculum. Additionally, she created a unit for her ELD 2 class’s curriculum, while doing student teaching about youth criminal justice.
“It gets students to identify some aspects of the law, and they get to see real world cases of these two juvenile students that unfortunately committed severe crimes,” Cifuentes said. “We get to break apart whether or not this individual should be tried as an adult or a juvenile. And so we explore a little bit the two sides of the system and the law.”
Cifuentes creates her lessons by starting out with a main goal that she wants to help her students to achieve. Next, she decides on daily objectives for the students and builds on that to create lessons that include those goals and objectives while being engaging.
“She’s good at explaining what we need to fix about our writing,” FHS sophomore Cecilia Austin said.
Cifuentes also tries to find the right way to support each of her students by finding new ways to teach specific topics to help everyone better understand the curriculum. She also gives them advice to help support them at school.
“My advice to students would be high school is the time to make mistakes,” Cifuentes said. “And it’s okay to make those mistakes, but it’s also a time to learn more about yourself and kind of start to build the discipline that you’re going to need in the real world.”
As well as helping support her students in class, she supports them by checking in with them about their days and how they are feeling.
“[The class is] pretty good. She gives us breaks in between hard stuff. So it’s manageably hard and it’s good,” Austin said.
While there are many aspects of teaching that Cifuentes enjoys, her favorite part is getting to know all the students in her classes better. She enjoys learning more about who they are to be able to help them more throughout the school year.
“I love hearing all about their days, their families, their backgrounds,” Cifuentes said. “It’s just really nice and rewarding to see when students can open up to you and you can kind of be that support pillar for them.”
