Ms. Kristina Carbajal is entering her third year working at Glendale High School, and this is her second year as a full-time Spanish teacher. She absolutely loves working here, and in every one of her classes, she wants all of her students to feel comfortable and like a part of her own familia.
Ms. Carbajal was born in Los Angeles and spent her childhood years there, until she was nine years old. She then moved to West Covina, where she attended Covina High School and graduated in 2007. A fun fact about her is that she is the thirteenth grandchild out of twenty-eight in her family, and she was the first to graduate high school.
You may have moments in your young life when you’ll try to figure out who you want to be. You may decide to become someone that others look up to, or you may instead pursue a job that pays well. In Ms. Carbajal’s case, she received her inspiration to teach from a negative experience in high school.
One day during her junior year, Ms. Carbajal asked her trigonometry teacher why she hadn’t been handed a quiz, when everyone else had gotten one. In response, her teacher told her, “You are going to fail anyway, so that would be a waste of a piece of paper.”
When her teacher told her this, Ms. Carbajal obviously felt “discouraged.” It made her “become unmotivated to try and learn the subject.”
“At first, I felt stressed, because I was struggling in the class,” she said. “But knowing that the teacher didn’t believe it in me, it made me want to give up on myself.”
However, this feeling did not last forever, because this experience actually inspired Ms. Carbajal to become a teacher herself. “His negative attitude toward my progress in his class made me want to be the complete opposite of him,” she admitted.
“It made me want to be understanding and helped me become empathetic toward others. I want to be someone who encourages and motivates students. I am my students’ number-one fan. Even if they don’t believe in themselves, I want them to know that I do.”
For Ms. Carbajal, this incident also served as a guidebook to being a teacher. “This experience helped me become empathetic and understanding of my students,” she said. “If I see someone struggling, I don’t want them to give up. I want them to try, and if they make mistakes, so be it!
“We learn from our mistakes. I want my students to enjoy learning a new language or even learning more about their native tongue. I just try to be as positive and encouraging as I can. I try my best to help my students have positive self-esteem, because that’s important.”
Even though Ms. Carbajal had a bad experience with her own teacher, it helped her to become a better teacher herself. It goes to show that a negative experience can act as an inspiration, rather than as an excuse for giving up on something that you have a passion for.
We should all be like Ms. Carbajal, whose empathy and compassion for her students helps them to achieve at their highest level. Make sure to treat the people in your life the same way, Nitros!
