ENGLISH: Adam Bicksler returns to the Riverside community as a new freshman literature teacher.
By Himadri Ratnayake, Staff Writer
Within the past couple of years, teachers who have been at Poly for several years have decided to retire, leaving room for new educators to take over and expand their careers.
Lately, the literature department switched up a few teachers. Mr. Adam Bicksler, a literature teacher, recently re-entered the Riverside community at Poly to teach the freshman Introduction to Literature course.
This is not his first teaching job. He began at Patriot High School and Mira Loma Middle School in the Jurupa Unified School District (JUSD), in which he taught for one semester each. As a student-teacher, he had two mentoring teachers raise him to the level at which he needed to be. Mr. Bicksler went to the University of California, Riverside (UCR) and then later transferred to San Diego State University (SDSU) for his teaching credentials.
He came to Poly because he wanted to work in an environment he enjoyed. “I wanted to teach in a district that I am familiar with, because I graduated from Ramona High School. It is also very close to home, and the community here is amazing. I love the students, and my co-workers as well as the administration are amazing. It is a great campus to work on,” Bicksler said.
When Mr. Bicksler was younger, he did not perform too well in literature, although there were a few teachers who inspired him to pursue a career. “I will be honest. I was a really terrible middle-school student, but I was always an avid reader,” Bicksler stated. He went on to remember the words of one of his teachers. “Ms. Johnston, my ninth grade teacher, taught me the value of reading literature and understanding it and the world around us. She also showed me how old pieces of literature are still relevant today because the themes in them are timeless,” Bicksler expressed. He went to UCR after his teenage days in high school were over and tried to undertake acting in theater. Unfortunately, that did not work out so well. But, luckily for us, he then decided to switch into the English Literature realm and join us at our school of excellence: Poly High School.