This year at Camas High School many new staff members were added to the faculty, twelve different people who have moved from other districts or that came straight from college. Many of these teachers joined Camas for many reasons and have a lot of outside activities and stories to tell.

Sam Hicks, a new teacher at Camas, graduated from college. When he was younger, he was diagnosed with dyslexia, inspiring his passion for teaching and wanting to pursue a career in education. He wanted to overcome the struggle and started to read more and practice ways that he can improve.

In ninth grade, he began school and new types of reading materials really interfered with how he could learn but by senior year he got 140 percent in English writing. What encouraged him was “having great teachers who said you can do this.” That is why he believes that encouraging his students to work hard on something that they do not get will push them to do even better then he hoped. 

During high school and college, he was able to put some of his own money in while working as a professional cowboy chasing cows for a living, working on a vineyard, and carpentry. Those three jobs were the main reason of why he was able to put himself through college.

Then after he went to college his first job was in Iowa as a presidential campaign. With this job he was able to meet Barack Obama twice. His company sent him out as what they like to say a “tracker” which is a person that goes around to the different candidates and voice record slip-ups that the candidates make. After the presidential campaigns were over he moved to Washington D.C.

When he moved to Washington D.C he lived there for about 10 years doing research jobs. And most of that time he was working in health care, he was working for a non-profit health care reform. 

He chose to be an English teacher because “I always wanted to be a teacher and I am dyslexic so becoming an English teacher to a certain extent is me showing people, yes a dyslexic person can become an English teacher. But I  still have trouble with spelling and reading out loud is still terrifying. But because I had to overcome these challenges it makes me more charitable and willing to look past as a student and think about what I can do to help you overcome these challenges that you have.” As a teacher who has struggled in the past with certain things getting in the way, he is able to talk it out with his students to make it so they enjoy writing like he did at their ages.

With the influence of his teachers and the peers around him his Junior year he was able to sign up and write for the school newspaper. He likes how it was him writing for a wide circuit of people around him, that could read and react to what he was writing about. The amount that he grew and had gotten impacted by all the people surrounding him made him want to teach high school.

Now fulfilling his dream and accomplishing teaching students the same lessons he was taught when he was in school has made working for Camas greater than he could imagine.