Get to Know New English Teacher Ms. Twineham

After returning to campus after quarantine, there is a sea of new teachers that are now having a chance to meet their students from the previous COVID year. One of the new teachers joining us here at SDHS is Ms. Twineham from the English department. 

Ms. Twineham taught at Rim of the World High School up in Lake Arrowhead before being hired at San Dimas. She made close connections with her old students and faculty to the point where they had inside jokes about her being a ‘flatlander’. This nickname was produced due to the fact that Ms. Twineham didn’t come from the mountains, which sparked this ongoing joke semester after semester. So with that in mind, Saints, her first impression of our campus was, “A classic high school setting because I feel like it such a smaller school than the one I went to. It looks like a closer community,” she says. We are tightly woven together and we do also have our own inside jokes that we can’t wait to share with these newbies. 

Just like the majority of Saints, we have been asked the question “what do you want to be when you grow up?” Ms. Twineham started to receive this question the most in middle school and decided to respond with being a teacher. As she grew up and started to hit milestones like graduating high school and then with college on the horizon, she started to question if she really wanted to pursue teaching. “I originally went in with Liberal Studies as my major, but then I switched to English, which I absolutely fell in love with to the point where I got my Masters in it,” she says. Shortly after graduating, she wanted to teach at a community college but instead decided to pursue high school. She really wanted to make a comfortable environment for all her high school students. 

Twineham’s classroom is an open, safe, and comfortable environment that any of our Saints would enjoy. Ms. Twineham wants her students to know that their voice matters and that it is heard. “Their voice matters. Your voice is important and not only with getting things you want but also how your voice can be dangerous too,” she says.

While bringing this up she makes a valuable point. We should be using our voices to spread kindness and not hate on this campus. She also wanted all of her students to know that we still impacted this world and shouldn’t be closed off to it because we’re in a classroom. “Students are a part of the world so we can’t close off the world once they come into the classroom,” she says. That’s why she wants her students to leave her at the end of the year with transferable skills like active listening, confident speaking, capable writers because those go outside of the classroom and you can face the world head on.

While we’re facing the world head on, Ms. Twineham was that child that would hide under her covers with a flashlight reading novels or hideaway in her closet devouring those not-so-PG books. Her love of reading followed her into adulthood and now translates into her teachings. Some of her current favorite books are One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey and On Beauty by Zadie Smith. A movie she would recommend to all is Blue Velvet by David Lynch because it’s an absolute trip. She also has a few pets as well, three dogs, two cats that happened to be rescued, and a tortoise. If she’s not curled up reading, watching a movie, or taking care of her furry friends, she’s off rollerskating. Ms. Twineham absolutely loves rollerskating and would like to do roller derby one day but says she’s too accident-prone. “I broke my tailbone so many times, I literally have a butt cushion that I carry with me because my tailbone is so sensitive,” Ms. Twineham says while she laughs. So maybe roller derby isn’t in her cards, but it might be in yours, so stop on by and say a friendly hello to Ms. Twineham!