Jonathan Rivera is a new English teacher at McIntosh High School. Before becoming a teacher at McIntosh, Rivera taught for five years before moving. He lived in Virginia and he moved here two years ago. Since Rivera moved to Georgia he wanted to teach at a Fayette County School.
“I applied and I interviewed several times before landing here at McIntosh, and I really like the environment and the fact that the school is so geared towards academic excellence. I really enjoy that part of it, and I love teaching,” Rivera said
One of Rivera’s big goals for his English classes involves reading.
“My number one goal for all of my classes is to have kids find joy in reading, especially since a lot of kids, especially ninth graders, tend to stop liking reading around middle school, and they don’t really care for it, and they’re kind of reluctant. So my hope is to reach as many of those students and try to connect them with a good book that they’ll like, and hopefully they can keep that habit of reading,” Rivera said.
One of Rivera’s favorite books is Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison.
Rivera graduated from the University of Southern Mississippi Foundation and was able to take a capstone class there.
“In my capstone class, I had a professor who was just brilliant, and she really made us do quite a lot of work, but it was meaningful work, and I felt that all of her assignments, I was able to learn something new and just the way she help the class, the feedback she had, I learned so much about teaching from her,” Rivera said.
After Rivera graduated from the university, Rivera served five years in the Army. Rivera was an intelligence analyst.
“But once I got out of the army, I did all types of work, the one [job] right before teaching that I was working in the summers and part time, I was working at a seafood processing plant, very long hours,” said Rivera
When Rivera was in the Army, he got to travel quite a bit. Rivera visited England, the Netherlands and also Rivera was deployed to Iraq twice. Rivera’s oldest child was born in Germany.
“Once I was in Europe, it’s so easy to travel everywhere. So I also went to Italy. I went to, obviously, the Netherlands and Germany. My favorite country is probably the Netherlands, just because the city that I lived in here was very small, but it was like, beautiful green. The weather was amazing. All year round, it did get cold, but it had really mild summers that were just beautiful days and the hills and the mountain, it was just beautiful. It’s a beautiful place to live,” Rivera said.
Rivera encourages students to read daily.
“I know it seems like we don’t have time to read. It seems like even me as a teacher, I have so much work to do, but I’m trying to be conscious about setting aside 10 or 15 minutes where I’m reading a book, something that I like, something that I enjoy. I’m not trying every day, but I try to, and I’m trying to push my students to read a little everyday,” Rivera.
