Ms.Clabough

Ms. Clabough is a first-year English teacher here at SMHS. She is also the book club adviser, along with Ms. Taylor. She has taught before but as a student teacher, and this is her first year as a full-time teacher. She has taught honors English and AVID as a student teacher at Fesler Jr High. She grew up in Santa Maria but isn’t an alumnus here at our school.

Ms. Clabough went to Hancock College for 2 years and got a her Associate of Arts degree in speech communication. She then changed her major to English. She got her bachelor’s degree at Cal State Fullerton and then transferred to Cal Poly for her teaching credential. One thing she is most passionate about is education.

She didn’t always plan to be a teacher. When she was in high school, she loved all her English classes and really liked her teachers and that kind of inspired her to be a teacher. She has always worked with kids in jobs like summer camps, tutoring, and after-school programs.

When the pandemic hit, Ms. Clabough had just got accepted into Cal Poly’s program and she found out that all of her classes were going to be online. She was bummed out because she was excited to be there on campus and thought that things would look up. Even though the classes were online, she got along with her classmates, and her teachers made her feel so closely connected. When she was teaching online, it was rough, but she still enjoyed it and most of her students enjoyed being online.

Ms. Clabough has a small family, as she is an only child. She has cousins that she is very close with that are around her age. She is the first person in her family to go to college. She has learned a lot from the experience and she has shared with her family what is it like to be in college.

She loves being here at SMHS. She loves the English department and getting to know the teachers here, and her students she finds to be awesome.

Ms. Clabough has traveled to the nearby states of Washington, Nevada, Arizona, and Oregon, but she has never gotten to visit the east coast.  That is one of her dream places to visit. One trip she visited outside of the US was Romania. She has never really lived anywhere permanently, besides here in Santa Maria, except when she went to college. Her favorite place to visit is Pismo Beach.

She likes popular movies like, Titanic, the Marvel Movies, Superhero Movies, etc. Her taste in movies is eclectic. One of her favorite foods is pasta. She likes to watch sports, but she isn’t an athletic person. She’s mostly into dance and cheerleading, but she really likes to watch basketball. She likes to go to concerts, shows, plays, musicals. She also likes to go on bike rides, go on walks, and listen to music. She tries to be outside when she can to just relax.

If Ms. Clabough wasn’t a teacher, she would like to a performer of some sort. When she was a kid, her dream was be on Broadway. She also said that she would like to work in a field that has anything to do with books, like a book editor, or copy editor.

One piece of life advice Ms. Clabough would give is, “don’t be afraid of change. It’s hard being in high school and being the age that you guys are. You are going through a lot of changes and it can be scary and different, but I always tell my students to embrace it. Don’t be afraid to change who you are, it’s never too late to become somebody you want to be. You can always live the life you want to live.”