During her 13 years at PHS, English teacher Elise Marks has taught almost every class in her department. This year, she is teaching two AP English classes, public speaking, and two Millennium High School English classes.

Marks is also coordinating the MHS Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) accreditation process in the fall. Then, she will oversee the MHS yearbook class in the spring.

“She’s a super teacher,” English teacher Debora Hill said of her colleague.

“Or just a complete idiot,” Marks said, sending a smile back across the room at Hill. “I always do this to myself one way or another.”

Because so many new English classes have come about within the last two years, such as 5-6 Honors English and American Studies, teachers have had to diversify their schedules. Marks pushes herself to teach a variety of these classes every year, she said.

“We have a lot more classes to cover, so more teachers are doing more ‘preps’,” Marks said. “When I started here, most teachers had two ‘preps’. They had three of one kind of class and two of another.”

Each ‘prep’, Marks said, is the time it takes for a teacher to prepare for each course in the seven-class schedule.

“I just tend to take four or five,” she said, referring to her ‘preps’. Most teachers have two or three, she said.

Marks’ energetic teaching style makes difficult texts, such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet, easier to understand, senior Julia Caldwell said.

“Her class is really animated,” she said. “It’s fun learning about the books as well as the history behind the books.”

Marks’ time at Harvard University, her alma mater, helped her develop her knack for English literature. Marks then found her way into education as a teaching assistant at UC Berkeley, where she received her Masters degree.

“People talk about having callings for certain things, and that’s really what it felt like,” she said of her time teaching lecture classes at Berkeley. “I had never really thought about doing it and I had never really wanted to do it, but once I started, I realized I really loved it.”

Marks then taught college English at Kenyon College in Ohio.

After realizing that she and her husband wanted to move out of Ohio, they decided to come west to California.

“We were going to work in the ‘dot-com’ industry, which fell apart,” she said. “But a very good friend of ours was a Piedmont resident. She told me, ‘The high school there has an opening and you should check it out.’”

Marks plans on staying in Piedmont for years to come.

“For a while at least,” she said. “It’s a hard job, it’s an exhausting job, but it’s interesting every day.”

Photo by Danny Kolosta