Science with Cissell

Brenda Cissell is the new Science teacher here at Woodford County High School. This is her fourth year of teaching. She taught for two years at a middle school in Virginia. Last year she taught at Woodford County Middle School and this is her first year teaching at a high school.

Ms. Cissell didn’t originally plan on becoming a teacher. After she graduated college she worked in a lab, so she knew from the beginning that she always wanted to work with Science. However, when she moved to Kentucky in 2001 she stopped working in labs because they were so different from the labs she worked in previously. After that, she started to volunteer at her kids’ schools.  She found while volunteering that she enjoyed working with children. So, she decided to go back to college and become a teacher.

“It’s a little different from teaching at the middle school. It’s different in some ways that are really good,” said Ms.Cissell. She says it’s interesting to see how the students at the high school have grown up and changed from the way they were in middle school. “It’s also a little bit harder in some ways,” she said. Ms. Cissell now teaches three different Science classes where at the middle school she only taught one Science class, but overall she likes teaching at the high school better.

Ms.Cissell feels that the students at Woodford County are able to get along and work well together. In other places that she has taught, Ms. Cissell feels she hasn’t seen students able to work together like in Woodford County. This is one of the reasons she enjoys teaching here in Woodford County.

Her greatest fear of teaching is when students feel they aren’t capable to learn something because they don’t understand. On the other hand, she is confident in her ability to be able to relate to teenagers. She advises her students to spend less time thinking about what others think about you and instead think about who you want to be. Personally, she focuses on what she can do to make things better because she knows she can control what she can do but she can’t control what others do.

Welcome to WCHS Ms. Cissell!