By Dana Sternthal
Staff Writer
Balancing college and a professional career isn’t easy, but Costa English teacher Stacy Cabrera proved it’s possible by going back to school to earn her master’s degree and managae a teaching job.
Cabrera’s first full year of teaching at Costa is this year, but she filled in for English teacher Bradi Everett when she left halfway through last year for maternity leave. She has always had a passion for the English language, and her passion for English and philosophy grew tremendously during her senior year of high school.
“I had an AP English teacher at my high school that integrated a lot of different schools of thought into the stuff that we were reading, and he gave reading a sense of purpose that I didn’t think purely looking at figurative language could give us,” Cabrera said. “I like having a sense of why people write what they write.”
Cabrera originally planned to double major in philosophy and English as an undergraduate college student at University of California, Riverside, but she decided to get only a minor in philosophy when she realized that she could graduate in three years if she did so.
“I kind of regretted doing that,” Cabrera said. “I’ve always wanted to go back and finish, and I was only about four classes short of majoring in philosophy, so instead of going back and doing an undergrad, I decided to go on and do a masters.”
Cabrera graduated this year on May 12 from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles with a master’s degree in philosophy. To get her degree, Cabrera completed a total of 10 classes. Each class had a requirement for a 20-page seminar paper. Her last paper was titled “The Author as Friend: A Defensive Intentionalism in the Ethical Criticism of Literature.”
“By the time you finish 30 units, you choose one of the papers you’ve written and you do an oral exam,” Cabrera said. “You pick a panel of about three of your professors to read your paper ahead of time and then you all talk about it for an hour.”
To get her degree, Cabrera also had to fulfill a language requirement in which she had to pass a standard reading knowledge test of one of four languages: Latin, Greek, French or German.
“I taught myself; it was terrible,” Cabrera said. “I just had a Latin book that I toyed with. It took me three years off and on to get to get a reading knowledge.”
Cabrera had to balance teaching full time at Costa and going to night school at LMU, writing paper after paper to get a degree she’s wanted for years.
“Time management is huge for me,” Cabrera said. “It’s something I learned taking a million APs in high school. I took six in my senior year, plus I was drum major in my band, so I learned early how to manage time.”
Cabrera has already begun integrating philosophical discussions into her curriculum.
“I’ve been putting philosophy stuff into my classes,” Cabrera said. “I love posing some grand question causing half the room to agree and the other half to disagree, and then we’ll talk about how those differences come up.”
Cabrera is also pioneering the Young Philosophers Club at Costa, which she hopes to make official in the fall.
“I like that we actually get to explore philosophy, which I feel is really neglected by this school,” junior Alex Fischer said.
Now that she’s accomplished her goal of receiving her degree in philosophy, Cabrera is already looking for another project that she can dedicate her free time to.
“I was reminiscing about the last two years at my graduation and that moment of getting my degree and now having a life again outside of grading essays and writing papers,” Cabrera said. “I hope to discover a new passion with my free time.”
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