Four years ago, Mrs. Eriquez started teaching in the English Department at Danbury High School. She got her undergraduate degree at Western Connecticut State University before moving on to earn her Master’s through Western Governors University. “I came into the game a little bit late in life. I was an Optician for a bajillion years before I got into education.”
Though she did not initially pursue teaching, she ended up pursuing it for a number of reasons. When she was a teenager, she struggled mentally and emotionally without much support. She went through school with “a string of absolutely horrendous teachers who were just like bad people who would say things like ‘I get paid whether you show up or not. I get paid whether you learn this or not.” Most students would agree that teachers can easily make or break any school experience and are a vital piece to having kids thrive in an educational environment. Lacking that was disheartening. However, Eriquez wasn’t completely deprived of a proper educational figure. “I did have one teacher, Mr. Douglas, who was not like that. He made me realize that there are probably a lot of other people in the world feeling exactly the way that I was feeling who would benefit greatly from someone to hear them out or just let them scream into the void for a few minutes. And I thought that would be a good fit so I decided to be the void.” Fast forward a few years later, that’s exactly the teacher she became. This year she teaches English II CP, English IV CP, and English IV Honors.
She generally stays confined to her tower in D building with the other English department staff, and she isn’t currently involved in any clubs here at the school. During school, she enjoys every part of the culture and community in the school. “Everyone, whether it’s a student or administrator, teacher, someone is an expert on something and they would love to talk your ear off about it. Everybody in this building has a passion and it’s really really nice getting to see all of those at play all at the same time when there’s 4000 bodies in one place.”
Her favorite unit to teach is Existentialism. “I think that it is a simultaneously cruel and incredibly useful way for seniors to end off their education because it presents them with a lot of really really massive life questions that people can get all the way to like 90 years old without ever really fully understanding.” She enjoys being a part of the conversations and realizations that come with the unit in every new group that handles the thought-provoking topic.
In her free time, Eriquez is a “part-time weekend mermaid.” In the dead of New England winter, she ends up in the water about once a month. Once it gets warmer she’ll go back to weekly visits up on Long Island with her mermaid friends where they are part of a mermaid pod. She highly recommends giving it a try. “It’s fantastic cardio and I’ve been a part of some weird hobbies over the years, this is my absolute favorite weird hobby full of delightfully weird people.” Eriquez herself can now be summed up as delightfully weird. With her passion for teaching Existentialism, knowledge of eyeglasses, and joy for mermaiding, she is an example for her students to pursue what makes them happy and express themselves to the fullest in her class and in their lives. “So yes, full-time teacher, part-time mermaid, 100% human.”
