Casey Engel

English teacher Casey Engel struggled with self-confidence and a difficult upbringing all her life, but now hopes to inspire her students to be happy with their own lives. (Photo by Natalie Sopyla)

Engel is Fierce

After growing up with a difficult home and family situation, English teacher Casey Engel learns to find happiness in her own life.

The lights are off in the classroom, yet the space is illuminated by the square-shaped glow of the projector at the front. Today they discuss insane asylum culture in the 1800s as English teacher Casey Engel scrolls through old black and white photos on the screen. Students murmur in amazement at the terrifying images of archaic instruments and patients strapped into chairs. They gasp in disbelief as Engel tells them of women who were institutionalized merely for having postpartum depression. This is not your conventional English class, and Engel wouldn’t want it any other way.

After struggling as a pre-med major at Loyola University Chicago, Engel switched gears and became an English major, a field that she says combines her love of both history and psychology. Connecting to the timeless issues presented in novels fascinates Engel, and she says that these topics are important to discuss.

“[English] is the most interesting study of human nature,” Engel said. “I like being able to every day come and discuss these things with everybody. I think it is the most important thing in our lives to discuss the ins and outs of being human.”

Stationed at the front of the classroom, Engel chats with students as they file in before class, asking them about their days. From the way she talks, it seems as though she is not a teacher, but rather a fellow student. What originally drew Engel to teach high school students was witnessing students during the most pivotal years of their lives, figuring out who they are. This desire to connect with students stems from Engel’s own days as an insecure high schooler.

“Up to my sophomore year, I wasn’t able to make eye contact with anybody,” Engel said. “I had no self esteem.”

Part of this lack of confidence comes from her chaotic family situation. By the time she was four, Engel’s family was already broken. Her parents were divorced; her father had been unfaithful and had moved to California. For one week each year, Engel anxiously awaited the day when her father

BY NATALIE SOPYLA FEATURE EDITOR

would visit and she could show him how much she had grown, how long her hair was and how well she was doing in school. Yet Engel said her father never responded much to this, leading her to believe that there was something wrong with her.

“I thought ‘Well if I’m fabulous, he’d want to be around me. So I must not be so fabulous,’” Engel said.

As if that weren’t enough, Engel’s family struggled financially as well. Her mother remarried when she was seven; however, after three years, her stepfather decided that he was not going to be, as Engel puts it, “gainfully employed.”

With a stepfather who did not want to be the breadwinner of the family, the task of providing for everyone fell to her mother, a therapist. Engel says that her mother was the type of person who couldn’t turn down a patient, especially one who couldn’t pay. Yet the family had now grown to a family of eight, and the income was barely enough to put food on the table. The house was condemned, and the family cars were repossessed.

“There was a lot of macaroni and cheese and cornbread,” Engel said.

Attending Shawnee Mission East for high school did not help matters either. Seeing the picture perfect lives of her friends’ families, Engel would often wonder what it would be like to have a normal one, one where her mother and father were together, and everyone lived comfortably. Humiliated, she was forced to lie to people in order to make it seem like her life was as normal as everyone else’s. Going to a large public school also meant that Engel struggled to stand out amongst the hundreds of people in her class.

“My class was 530 people. If you weren’t in the top 10, you were seriously a number,” Engel said. “I felt like there was no way for me to stand out and feel like I was an individual.”

However, things began to turn around when Engel became drum major of her high school band. According to Engel, this was when she broke out of her shell of negativity and began to feel more comfortable with herself.

“I forced myself to become a leader of 130 people,” Engel said. “That gave me a lot of confidence.”

Flash forward a few years, and Engel is now a leader for not only the students she teaches, but the student body as a whole. Engel says she feels that she has a lot to offer high school students in terms of helping them through the most formative years of their lives. As someone who understands some of the difficulties that students go through, Engel says that she has learned that the best way she can help students is by simply being there.

“My first couple of years of teaching, my response was, ‘What can I do? Let me help you,’” Engel said. “Now it’s just, ‘Let me listen and be with you.’”

Junior Maddi McMaster has Engel as a teacher this year and says that she loves the relaxed atmosphere of the class. She says that Engel’s positivity and eagerness to make learning fun are what inspire her as a student.

“You can tell how much she truly loves what she does just by the way she interacts with her students,” McMaster said.

Class has begun, and though they are discussing the novel they are reading, the conversation has not lost its lighthearted energy. This is thanks not only to Engel’s quips and jokes, but to the thoughtful questions she poses to her students, yet another way in which she tries to make centuries-old works relatable and interesting. Like the characters in the novels and the students in her classes, Engel understands struggle.

She has risen above her own difficulties and hopes to inspire others to do the same.

“I may not be rich or famous or make some great intellectual discovery,” Engel said. “But I can still lead a really happy life, and hopefully influence people to be happy with theirs.”