New Teacher Spotlight: Brianna Beehler

By Pooja P.

October 31, 2021

Have you heard about Brianna’s wooden spoon?

Upon visiting Oxford in her Junior year of college, she competed in a sailing regatta, in which those who did very well in the competition received a fancy wooden paddle with all of the team members’ names on it. If you don’t do well, you receive a wooden spoon, which is exactly what happened to Brianna. “When we were racing, we got stuck in the riverbank,” she said with a laugh. “But we had a lot of fun, and I really enjoyed the whole experience. It's actually a really positive memory for me.”

Brianna’s philosophy of embracing and learning from your mistakes exists not only in her memories but also in her classroom. This is her first year instructing Comparative Literature and Methods and Meaning in English at KLHS. Before this, Brianna taught at USC and recently finished her PhD in English, focusing on 19th-century cultural practices and narrative form. There, she taught Intro to Composition and a Thematic Optional Honors Program. She spent eight years in southern California, ultimately realizing that she wanted to devote her time to teaching. “I love the conversations I get to have with students. This past year, I was actually on a research fellowship. I realized how much I missed teaching . . . it became clear to me that I had to return to teaching.” 

She also made the decision to switch from teaching in a college environment to a high school one. “It was actually my college students that told me I should think about high school teaching because I reminded them so much of their high school English teachers,” she shared with me. 

While teaching was a passion that Brianna discovered later, she has always had a love for English, especially the importance of studying literature and stories. “I think, especially now, turning to fiction is such an important skill and an important way of both escaping and learning how to cope with reality.” In fact, Brianna loves and values stories so much so that she wanted to be an archeologist when she was younger. “I wanted to be an archeologist because I loved the idea of an object being able to tell stories, but then I realized that archeology actually involved a lot of science that I wasn’t as interested in. I realized then that I could find all of these things through the study of English.” Brianna certainly encourages us to appreciate stories and literature in her class, and we’re really grateful that she has joined us!