By Feature Editor: Hannah Snyder
Choosing a career can be the hardest thing for a person to decide. In multiple cases, the career field a person originally picks won’t necessarily be what they spend the rest of their lives doing. For Ms. Margaret Breece, her job at Howell High School wasn’t exactly how she imagined her life would turn out.
Ms. Breece graduated from East Lansing High School with the intention of eventually going to law school. However, her dreams took a turn and she found herself majoring in environmental science at the University of Michigan. She minored in English and followed up at Michigan State University for her master’s degree.
“It was my love for outdoors and such that made me want to go into environmental science. I think the subject is really important for kids to learn and it was a lot of fun to teach,” Ms. Breece says.
After school cutbacks and issues in the economy, Ms. Breece wasn’t able to fully pursue her environmental science dream. However, Ms. Breece did follow her second passion and began teaching English and other similar electives.
As of the 2013-2014 school year, Ms. Breece has been teaching for exactly 40 years. This year Ms. Breece has a very uniform schedule and teaches Senior English every hour. In the past though, she has taught Humanities, Advanced Composition, Journalistic Writing, and many more English based courses.
Room U-3 is much more than an average classroom at HHS. Coming from a family with several teachers and professors in it, Ms. Breece has a very unique teaching style. Students can expect a very relaxed, welcoming environment to learn in.
“I like to teach students things that I think are important to know,” Ms. Breece says.
Ms. Breece is one of the longest working staff members at HHS today. Throughout the past 40 years she’s seen the school at both its lowest and highest points. Long days of grading homework, quizzes and essays have never once stopped Ms. Breece from continuing on with what she loves.
“I feel really weird to think I’ve been doing this as long as I have. We used to have to design our own curriculum and almost everything. It was a lot of work but we had so much more freedom,” Ms. Breece says.
When each school year comes to an end Ms. Breece cherishes every moment of her summer. From riding horses, to boating, or even just walking her dog on Sunday mornings, Ms. Breece knows how important it is to step back during the summer and enjoy the little things before the school year begins. Living on a lake gives her the freedom and adventure she loves.
“I love taking my sailboat out on the lake in the summer,” Ms. Breece says
Even though Ms. Breece used to have a dream to attend law school and a love for environmental science, she has tried to dedicate her life to the education of each student she encounters.
“If I can show a student how to do something they’ve never learned before or teach something in a different way, it’s so great. Watching seniors walk across that stage on graduation feels so good,” Ms. Breece says.
