Finding Her Teaching Voice - NYTimes.com Elizabeth Solis, 30, is an assistant principal and history teacher at Arise, a charter high school in East Oakland, Calif. Q. You teach high school students from non-English-speaking homes. What got you interested in that? A. For starters, I was one of them. I was born in San Jose, Calif.; my parents were immigrants - Dad from Nicaragua, Mom from Guatemala. My mother, a Jehovah's Witness, taught me the alphabet early, using biblical texts. Yet I did poorly in school since there was no expectation at home to achieve academically, mainly because Jehovah's Witnesses in my congregation at the time discouraged pursuing secular higher education. Ironically, though, the teacher-student evangelical style of Jehovah's Witnesses was the foundation of my teaching ability later in life. Through first-person narrative writing and interviewing family members, I came to know and better appreciate myself and my heritage. It gave me a voice that had been only a whisper till then. That's when I got engaged with learning, and it sparked my desire to teach. How do you try to engage your students? I use strategies I developed from my own experience and added many new ones I picked up as a summer fellow of the Bay Area Writing Project at the University of California, Berkeley. The idea is for teachers to share their in-class successes with one another, rather than follow the traditional textbook approach. What is one of your in-class successes? I teach a section on identity and conformity based on zombies. I get the kids to explore whether people are becoming philosophical zombies, and to ponder what we call normal in society. I also use films like "Star Wars," "Independence Day" and "Avatar" as a segue to talking about issues of colonialism in America, past and present. That opens us up to explore more complex ideas like hegemony, inequity, institutionalized racism and transformative resistance. Do you have to spend a lot of time disciplining students? It's a misconception that urban school students are not capable of self-discipline. Anyway, I don't discipline; I harness passion and curiosity. When things look like they could get out of hand, I notice it quickly and don't let it escalate. That said, it helps to set boundaries early on. My first year out of school, I decided I should be as "scary" as possible, then after that I'd have a "reputation." In truth, I am not that scary. Vocations asks people about their jobs. Interview conducted and condensed by Perry Garfinkel.