“I like Mrs. Campbell, she’s a very good teacher,” says Naitsy Suarez Colon, a freshman at Landstown High School.
Mrs. Megan Campbell is a third generation teacher and a mother of an 8-month-old boy. “Both my mother and grandmother were teachers,” she says.
Currently, she teaches at Landstown High School, and she teaches both 10th and 11th grade social studies.
However, Mrs Campbell didn’t always teach high school social studies. In fact, this is her first year teaching high school students. Before her current position at LHS, she taught sixth, seventh, and eighth grade AVID at Landstown Middle School (LMS) for several years.
Even before that, she taught sixth and seventh grade social studies for a few years at Marshall Middle School in Fairfax, Virginia.
In college, she studied to become a social studies teacher. Then, when she started teaching at LMS around four to five years ago, she decided to become an AVID teacher there because that was one of the positions that they had available to her.
When asked why she decided to stop teaching AVID and return to teaching social studies at LHS, she explained that “it was the requirement and all the data collection and the different events, and when I became a mom, it became too much.”
When her class of 2029 students found out she would also be transitioning to the high school level with them, they really expressed their excitement about the fact they wouldn’t have to say good bye to her quite yet.
One of Mrs. Campbell’s former students, Stephany Joya-Rodriguez, who is now a freshman at LHS, even stated one of her most memorable moments was receiving a letter from Mrs. Campbell.
“For me, I really liked the little letter she wrote me at the end of eighth grade. That was really sweet,” Joya-Rodriguez explains.
The letter was a personalized note to each of her students that talked about how each one of them improved and how she couldn’t wait to see what they would accomplish in the future.
At the end of each letter she even wrote “make sure to invite me to your graduation,” showing how much she tried to make every one of her students like they were important and how even in the future she will still care about them.
“One of my favorite things Mrs. Campbell did was play games with us every Friday, especially the cup game,” Suarez Colon said of her teaching style.
She then goes on to talk about the memories she made in the class through different games and activities done like the cup game that students also called “hands, knees, cup”, the rock project where students had to paint kind messages on rock and hide them in the community, and a presentation about dream careers.
These are some of the ways past students of Mrs. Campbell’s say she made a normal class that may be seen as boring into an enjoyable class that creates fun memories that will last for years.
To her former students, it is obvious how much Mrs Campbell cared about all her students and wanted them to enjoy her class along with learning all about AVID and ensuring a good classroom environment.
Mrs. Campbell encourages all of her students to take risks and to step outside of their comfort zone. Whether it was telling them they should try out a new club, sport, or activity, or encouraging them to run for a leadership role in the school or activity.
It is also clear how much attention Mrs. Campbell paid to each one of her students’ education and making sure her students had a positive experience in her class.
It is without a doubt that Campbell cares for each of her students individually and as one whole.
She explained, “Seeing my past students in the halls makes the feeling of never seeing you guys after middle school a little bit easier.”
