This is a printer-friendly version of an article from Zip06.com.
06/28/2017 07:00 AMAfter watching his mother have a positive effect on kids’ lives as a teacher, Evan Soderholm says that inspired him to become a teacher himself for the same reasons. Evan was recently voted Teacher of the Year for North Haven High School.
“It feels good,” says Evan, “It’s nice to be appreciated, because teaching is a job where you work a lot behind doors and without a lot of people seeing and noticing.”
Evan has friends who have jobs in finance, and he says they talk about how easy a teaching job must be, citing having summers off and getting out of work at 2 p.m. every day.
“The time in school is just where I perform,” Evan says, “I’ve got to prepare for that. That doesn’t just come out of thin air; it takes hours and hours and hours of work.”
Evan’s inspiration, his mother, was previously an accountant for Sikorsky, but Evan says she gave that up because she wanted to make a difference in kids’ lives.
His mother taught in the same school Evan attended, and he recalled a time when a “notorious, bad kid” came up to him. Evan says he was terrified at first.
“He was like, ‘I just want to thank your family for all the things your mom has done for me,’” Evan says.
That notorious kid has since joined the military, become a marine, started a family, and comes over for dinner every now and then, Evan says.
“That’s what I want to do; I want to make high school a better place for these kids, and I want to show kids that life is worth living, and there’s so much opportunity and so much good ahead as long as you work hard and can put a positive attitude on your life,” says Evan.
Evan teaches psychology at the high school, and next year will have four classes of AP and one class of Level 2.
When he was student teaching as an intern at the high school, he says the AP psychology teacher at the time was taking the last two months off for surgery, and he was asked to be the long-term substitute while she was out.
Although he had never taught psychology before, he says he enjoyed it in college and wanted to give it a try.
“It’s so fascinating,” Evan says, “Psychology is just the study of human behavior, so every student can connect in some way.”
In addition, Evan is teaching classes at Sacred Heart University this summer as part of federally funded Upward Bound Program, which provides low income families from the Bridgeport area the opportunity to further their education with high school level classes and hands-on experience.
“I’m a very firm believer that everybody should have an equal opportunity to further themselves educationally. It’s one of the most important things that we could do,” Evan says, “I love to help out people that are less fortunate and that might not be able to have the type of resources that they do during the normal school year.”
Another way Evan gives back is that he also runs a youth group for high school kids at a church in Easton. Last year, Evan had a student who was president of a club called First Priority, which is a religious community service club to plan community service projects and events.
Evan was asked by the student to become an advisor, which he did. When the student told Evan that she wanted to branch out and meet other kids in other areas, Evan brought her to his youth group.
“Her whole family is like a huge part of our church now,” Evan says.
In his spare time, Evan enjoys sports, reading, the outdoors, and is an avid Game of Thrones fan. A fan of the Minnesota Vikings football team, he says he gets teased a lot because “they’re the worst.” One of the hardest things Evan says he went through as a teacher was one year when he told his students that the Vikings were going to the Super Bowl and would win a lot of games. After the team lost its first game of the year to the San Francisco 49ers, a Monday night game which Evan stayed up until 2 a.m. to watch, he says he came in the next day and his students let him have it. However, part of the reason Evan likes sports is because many kids at the high school level enjoy sports, which makes it an easy way to connect with them.
In fact, Evan says he learns as much from his students as they do from him.
“I think every year that I’ve been a teacher I’ve grown leaps and bounds as a man and as a human,” Evan says, “That’s something that I don’t think the students realize; how big of an impact they have on me.”