Pizza and a Yavapai College professor's message about doing better by K-12 students led Cassie Norman to teach. Love for her students is keeping her in a career rendered heart-wrenching by the COVID-19 pandemic.

At Bradshaw Mountain High School in Prescott Valley, where Cassie was raised by her grandmother, the prospect of pizza drew Cassie to an education club meeting. She wasn't a fan of school, nor was she thinking about the future. But she liked pizza. She also "liked kids and getting to know people," she said of her accidentally-on purpose club membership.

A disinterested student, Cassie spent her high school summers restoring credits so she could graduate on time. "For a long time I had no inclination that I would be college-bound. I wasn't the type to go to college."

A minimum-wage job in retail convinced Cassie to enroll at Yavapai College for a chance to do something more with her life. "I didn't have anybody in my entire family that had gone to college. I grew up rural, low-income in houses that we didn't own. I just didn't want that for myself or for my family. I didn't want to live in a really difficult spot my whole life."

Noting her Education Club membership at BMHS, Cassie's YC advisor suggested she start an education track. Cassie acquiesced and, in her very first class, was "sold" on pursuing a teaching career. The selling point: YC Professor Tara O'Neill asserting that slowly but surely teaching was changing – that project-based learning and other innovations were trickling into the classroom. "In my head I was thinking about how I was taught and it was awful… reading out of a book, taking notes and memorization," Cassie recalled. Professor O'neill, she said, "Sold me on the idea that education could be engaging and fun and students didn't have to hate their lives while going to school."

Cassie is now engaging and motivating students as a seventh-grade science teacher at Eastmark, a combined middle and high school in Queen Creek. In her "glorious and ginormous" science classroom, a bulletin board is decorated with YC promotional materials, including a marketing postcard on which Cassie was featured while she was a student at YC. But it's students who rouse Cassie, a notoriously late sleeper, from bed every weekday morning to rally them around projects like creating pop-up books showing how the human body works.

"I'm excited for every lesson I teach," Cassie said. "It's the best thing when you get to explain real-life stuff like that and you get to see their eyes light up. Lightbulb moments are real and they're loud."

Cassie has been teaching in-person since August and, unlike many of her students, their parents and grandparents, has avoided COVID-19 infection so far. She weighed in on her district's decision to keep students in school, saying the equity gaps of distance learning and teachers' ability to protect students from dangers outside of school – are important considerations.

However, Cassie's emotions got the best of her when sharing the pandemic-induced human loss suffered by her students and sometimes, their resulting disappearance from school. "There's nothing more heartbreaking than not knowing where your kids are," she said.

Teaching in-person also forced Cassie's beloved grandmother, Muriel Kukral, to move out of the home Cassie also shares with her high-school and Yavapai College sweetheart, Brent Dreibelbis. Cassie plans to welcome her grandmother home again as soon as it's safe. She and Brent plan to marry in April.

Another of Cassie's post-pandemic plans: pursuing a master's degree in business or finance so one day she can open her own hands-on learning school while doing her part to close equity gaps in education. "I want to catch the other half (the have-nots), before they get lost like me," she said. "My mentality has just been why do anything to limit myself."

Cassie is optimistic that as education modes continue to evolve, salaries increase and equity improves, more people will pursue teaching careers. She suggests future teachers start their education journeys at YC for the "phenomenal professors" the "cost-value proposition" and the supportive, family environment.

"I'll always remember what it looked like and what it felt like walking across campus," Cassie said. "I had the time of my life at Yavapai."

For information about how to launch a teaching career at YC, email tara.oneill@yc.edu