![The cross country team poses for the camera after finishing the district meet. The varsity boys, JV boys and JV girls all placed third and the varsity girls placed fourth. “Coach put in the right training for us for this season, so I think we will be peaking this week and the next couple of weeks,” varsity runner and junior Nathan Kukla said. “The chances of making it to state are very high, but we don’t settle for the lowest and there is always going to be that chance, so [we] race for the best.”](https://cphswolfpack.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Heidi-831-1200x900.jpg)
![Sucking in a breath of air, freshman Lily Pope competes in the 200 yard individual medley. On Oct. 25, the swim team competed in the AISD Swim Invitational. Overall, the girls team took second place and the boys team came in eleventh. “My favorite stroke is butterfly because I do the best in that stroke,” Pope said. “I feel like [butterfly] can test how [your ability] to convince yourself to keep going. The hardest part of swimming is convincing yourself to stay strong and keep pushing during a hard race [when] everything is tired.”](https://cphswolfpack.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/POPE-1200x804.jpg)
![Smiling at the camera, Author Ehigbor Okosun, members of Page Turners, and other students reflect on the author's visit. “I thought the visit was great,” Senior Amia De Leon said. “It was interesting talking to her and [getting to know] her process and her thoughts and books in general. But I think the reason it went well [was that] people got to ask questions. I'm glad that she said so much in response to the questions and it wasn't just one and done. [The author’s responses] felt very articulate.”](https://cphswolfpack.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Sebastian-5-1200x800.jpg)
![Standing in front of the field at a freshman football game, cheerleader freshman Jacob Gaudreau along with teammate freshman Bella Gibson pose for a photo during halftime of game. “[Cheer has] definitely given me a much more outgoing personality,” Gaudreau said. “I used to be very introverted, so it's definitely made me more extroverted towards people.”](https://cphswolfpack.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Ingrid-204-1200x800.jpg)
![Holding a wooden pizza toy, senior Taylor Peterson plays with small children in Bucaramanga, Colombia. During the summer, Peterson traveled to Colombia to help build an elementary school that only had two classrooms but five or six grades with one teacher. “We add[ed] two more classrooms,” Peterson said. “It’s kind of hard when you have two or three grades in one classroom and you only have one teacher. It’s very hard to actually get some beneficial learning. [The extra classrooms will give the students] a better quality of education because they’ll actually have a place specific for their learning.” Photo by Taylor Peterson](https://cphswolfpack.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Taylor-P.png)
![Swinging with his arm extended, senior Nolan Park hits the ball smoothly over the net and to the opponent’s side. Park is one of four varsity tennis captains and helped the team win district championships. “Winning district champs was a pretty awesome feeling,” Park said. “We had lost to Liberty Hill a couple of weeks before, but when we played them [again], we came out and really took care of business. We took them out and it was just a really awesome night.”](https://cphswolfpack.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Kassidy-419.jpg)
![Standing proud, varsity senior athletes Rafael Escobar, Griffin Jacobs, Jakob Martin, and juniors Jackson Springer and Jack Morris pose with their newly earned medals. The varsity team finished third out of 14 teams on Sept. 25. “The team's primary goal is to win the district championship,” head coach Cody Price said. "We're confident that with our action plan in place, we can accomplish this mission. [For the next tournament], our preparation involves assessing our strengths and weaknesses, celebrating milestones and creating individual development plans." Photo courtesy of Cody Price](https://cphswolfpack.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/golf.jpg)
As the new school year has started, many new faces have appeared in staff and faculty. One of these new faces is AP U.S. History teacher Andie Anderson. Anderson brings a new perspective to the world of teaching, due to her upbringing, love for pop culture and sci-fi and a dedication to education.
Anderson has been a teacher for 12 years, and taught in Louisiana for eight of them. There, she worked at a middle school for four years before being offered a teaching position at a local high school. Anderson later moved to Texas, where she began living and working in Cedar Park.
“My best friends and my godchildren moved here during the COVID [pandemic], and at the school I was at [at the time], I was coming up to the point where I was going to be leaving because I just wasn’t the right fit anymore,” Anderson said. “They told me to come here, so I moved here.”
After moving, Anderson taught at Danielson Middle School for three years.
“I made good friends with Mrs. Aguilar over the past year, and she kept telling me how great it is here,” Anderson said. “She kept trying to convince me to come, and I wanted to come back to high school. The environment that’s here that she was telling me about made me really feel like it might be a good place to come back to high school. Then I got to meet Mr. Sloan and Miss Lux, and they kind of just solidified it.”
Coming from Louisiana, Anderson has plenty of stories to tell regarding their teaching experience, most notably, the time she had to go to court after her first year of teaching high school.
“We were having graduation and after graduation, as I was walking out to my car, one of the graduates, her sister and her mom, were starting to argue with two of my 10th graders, and that turned into a full blown fight,” Anderson said. “I was trying to break it up and eventually the cops came running to help, and everybody but me ended up arrested. I ended up having to go to court as a witness to explain what had happened. So now, it’s one of my major rules: don’t make me have to go to court. It’s just not fun. ”
Anderson said she has a huge affinity for all things sci-fi. She particularly loves “Doctor Who” and “Star Wars,” and has no problem talking about it for as long periods of time.
“‘Star Wars’ actually came about when I was a kid, and they were my oldest brother’s favorite movies,” Anderson said. “We would watch them together all the time, and then Darth Vader became my favorite character when I was five [years old], and I have just loved ‘Star Wars’ ever since.”
Anderson’s favorite “Star Wars” project is “Andor,” the Disney+ series.
“I heard that it was one of the best projects that ‘Star Wars’ has turned out,” Anderson said. “[In it], there are just normal people in a world, rebelling against the systems. I kind of always think that’s just part of who I am. I always really get into people who fight back against oppressive systems. I think that’s why it’s so good, and I can’t wait for the second season to come out.”
Anderson has a somewhat obscure form of motivation when teaching history, and that is due to her previous experiences as a student, she said.
“I had a really terrible Social Studies [teacher], he didn’t ever really teach,” Anderson said. “He had something called an overhead projector, and he had a binder of these overhead transparencies, and so every day it was just changing [them] out. He wouldn’t even explain the thing. We just sat there, took notes and read it. History is a lot more interesting when you’re not bored. It’s also something that teaches you how to look at the world in different ways, and it teaches you how to think critically. It’s more than just learning about facts and dates and stuff like that. It’s about learning how life works around you, and when we come at history that way, and we invite kids to engage in that discussion in that thought process, and to see how even though this happened 100 and some years ago, it’s still relevant. Kids get into it and generally like it and generally makes them start thinking about how they impact the world around them, too.”
Anderson said that CP feels like the right fit for her and feels more serene than the previous years of her teaching.
“When you’ve had a career like mine, quiet is blissful,” Anderson said. “Quiet is very blissful. It took me a minute to get to the point where I wasn’t suspicious of quiet, but now I’m happy and this is a good place to be.”
