Mrs. Akbarzadeh is an English 2 teacher at Aliso Niguel High School. She has been teaching at Aliso Niguel for five years, but she previously taught at Centella High School for one year and Capo Valley High School for 16 years. She has been an English teacher for 22 years in total.
While becoming a teacher was not always her original plan in life, she decided to give it a try after college because her family has a large history of being teachers. She says that both of her parents, her grandpa and two of her siblings are involved with the education department.
Her original plan was to either become a forest ranger or a writer, but in her time in college, she realized that that wasn’t what she wanted to do.
She went to school at Vanguard University without a set plan for a specific field of interest. Since both of her parents enjoyed being teachers so much, she decided to give it a try and go back to school to get her teaching credentials.
While she says that she hated all of the classes she took, she also said that after teaching for the first time in a classroom, she absolutely loved it.
“I really like working with high schoolers. This is an age group that’s really fun because it’s less about discipline and attitude and more about you teenagers who are becoming adults and finding themselves,” says Mrs. Akbarzadeh.
She stated that she likes being able to guide students on the right path and helping them figure out what is the right path for them.
Mrs. Akbarzadeh got her bachelor’s at Vanguard University, her credential at Long State University (CSULB) and then got her master’s degree at University of California, Irvine (UCI).
She chose to become an English teacher because of her love for literature and history. She said she also might have become a history teacher if English didn’t work out, but she ended up enjoying English much more.
When asked about what rules she believes should be enforced in every classroom, she answered with, “Students not having cell phones is, I think really great, for kids to take a break from their cell phone and spend more time actually talking to the humans around them.”
She loves the psychology of characters in novels and the fictitious world that readers enter when they read stories. She enjoys the way stories display the feelings and emotions while history displays the emotionless statistics of life.
“I think she has a really kind soul and she’s very caring for us and that she’s very understanding when we have things going on in our own lives that sometimes affect our schoolwork,” said Elle Aguilar (10), one of Mrs. Akbarzadeh’s students.
Mrs. Akbarzadeh has taught freshmen, sophomores and juniors during her time teaching English. She says she enjoys teaching sophomores the most because the topics they learn about are interesting and she also likes how they are at the beginning of discovering themselves.
Mrs. Akbarzadeh is a very cherished and loved teacher by her students and has a very high pass rate in her class.
