Ayden Justice

Haslam

ENGL 2010

5/12/2022

The Relationships We Make: Interview with McKenzie Catten

At my school, and many schools in Utah, overpopulation is a problem that I have noticed

growing. I know how that personally affects me and my friends but I wanted to know what it was

like on the other side of things, the side of the teachers. So I decided an interview was the best

option. One of my favorite teachers this year was my Humanities teacher, McKenzie Catten.

When I began considering who I should interview about overpopulation in high schools, I felt I

needed to find a teacher to interview that loved their students, would give me completely honest

answers, and had been a high school teacher for a while. Ms. Catten checked all of these boxes

for me. She has been a teacher at Copper Hills High School for 16 years, and I thought this made

her the perfect person for the job!

For the first part of the interview, I asked her questions about why she became a teacher

and what makes her enjoy going to work. Ms. Catten explained that all the way up until her

sophomore year of college, her plan was to become a lawyer that majored in Political Sciences.

One day she woke up and had, what she explained as, an existential crisis. She remembered

waking up and realizing that she hated what she was doing and needed to change, so she sat

down and wrote a list. She explained to me that the list was supposed to be made up of the

people who had had the biggest impact on her in her 20 short years of life. When she finished

writing the list, she looked at it and realized that every person she had written the name of was a

teacher, the most important name being her mom’s. She knew then that teaching was where she
was meant to be. She also told me that she loved teaching because she gets to build relationships

with her students. She looks forward to going to school because she can laugh and make jokes,

but also be serious and talk to them on a personal level. She also mentioned that it makes her feel

good knowing that she is making an impact, even if it's small.

After the more personal questions, I got into the questions about overpopulation in high

schools and the effects she has seen and felt. When I asked her if she had seen a change in the

school over the course of 16 years she told me she definitely had. There has been a huge

difference in the way the halls look in between classes, the lunchroom during lunch and the

commons after school. She did mention , though, that her class sizes hadn’t changed a lot since

she had been teaching because she teaches higher level classes which generally means less

students. She did tell me that her coworkers at the school who teach classes for the younger

grades are huge and become overwhelming for students. She explained to me that at the

beginning of every new school year, all the teachers at Copper Hills have every intention of

getting to know every single one of their students by the end of the first semester but realize

fairly quickly that once again, this is not going to happen. She also mentioned that oftentimes the

students that get left behind are the ones that need the most help. She told me about a time where

she traveled out of the country to a conference with teachers from other countries and she vividly

remembers the looks she’d receive from teachers when talking about the class sizes of 40 kids.

She says that around the world, the number of students in classes is not nearly that high.

Upon hearing her answers to her general feelings of over crowding, I asked her some

follow up questions about how she feels big students bodies have affected her. She told me that it

was very hard at first. In her first year at Copper Hills, she was thrown into teaching a class of 40

sophomores and she could not do the job that she needed to because it was too overwheliing.
Eventually she realized it became more manageable when she grew a more personal relationship

with students, rather the typical student-teacher relationship that is expected. SHe also mentioned

how hard it becomes to have the multiple jobs teachers are expected to fulfill. Not only is she in

charge of teching the children of our world, but she is also tasked with making sure the mental,

emotional and physical health of her students is ok. She is in charge or being the janitor of her

room. She is in charge of disciplining. She takes on many roles as a teacher, and thinks that

people often forget that. SHe says that more in the last year she has thought about quitting. She

told me that the world is transitioning from a place of love and appreciation for teachers to a

place where teachers are the villains. SHe says coming to work often scares her because of the

fact that she could say the wrong thing and get in trouble.

When I was finishing up my interview With Ms. Catten, she told me that although it gets

hard, she loves her job and that she thinks it is important that everyone finds that one teacher that

leaves a lasting impact because the power that teaching can have on someone is strong. She says

she will teach until she can’t teach any longer, and then she’ll probably come back to sub after

that! I loved interviewing Ms. Catten. She definitely opened up my eyes to a perspective I didn’t

have before.