Mia Morneault

Staring at her monitor, APUSH Teacher Ms. Anderson starts working on her next lesson to keep students engaged. “History is a lot more interesting when you’re not bored.” Anderson said. “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.”

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.”