Oak Park High School has an extremely diverse population —not only of students, but of the staff as well. The person that stands in front of you and educates you may have wanted to go into the theater, worked as a stockbroker or maybe he or she even minored in Marxism.

All of the teachers at the high school went to high school and college, of course, but their paths between school and teaching are all different, and some are much more complicated than others.

For history and economics teacher Tim Chevalier, a career in teaching had always been a possibility. However, he initially wanted to go into financial planning.

“Both my parents were teachers,” Chevalier said, “so I grew up with educators, and I saw first hand that being part of an education family is really stable.”

Chevalier graduated from Thousand Oaks High School before attending and playing basketball at Westmont College.

Chevalier described playing a college sport as “a lot of pressure,” but noted that he made “lifelong friendships that are much more important than basketball.”

At Westmont, Chevalier studied business, economics and history, eventually becoming a financial planner after college and a stockbroker in Santa Barbara.

“I thought that I wanted to get into the financial world and manage money or do something along those lines,” Chevalier said. “It didn’t bring me very much joy, and so I decided to go back and get my teaching credential and my master’s degree in education at Cal Lutheran.”

Because Chevalier wanted to coach, he worked with his father, who coached basketball at Oak Park High School. He completed his student teaching under government teacher and baseball coach Robert Hall and finally became a teacher himself. This is Chevalier’s ninth year at the high school.

“You have to be willing to continually learn and improve, you have to have a heart for helping other people, especially the youth,” Chevalier said. “You have to be, in my opinion, a stable individual who can be a positive role model for young adults… When you’re in education, it’s who you are.”

A varied career history seems to be a trend. History and mock trial teacher Victor Anderson was interested in social science early on, but his path originally led him in a different direction.

“I got accepted to Stanford and UCSB; unfortunately my father didn’t want to pay for Stanford,” Anderson said.

A month before school started, Anderson transferred to University of California, Riverside, and joined a program that would earn an MD in seven years.

However, Anderson was unable to place in a high enough percentile in the program and was cut. After taking a class on World War II, he realized how much he enjoyed history.

“I fell in love with it because [the professor] talked about it from a different perspective,” Anderson said. “I ended up triple majoring with political sciences and minored in Marxism.”
Though Anderson joined the Union as a carpenter, he applied to both the Marine Academy and law school — and chose the latter. After passing the California Bar Exam, he worked as an estimator for his father.

But when Anderson’s son played football in high school, Anderson volunteered as a coach, and enjoyed it so much that his son asked him if he ever considered teaching.

So, Anderson quit his estimating job.

“I took night classes in Cal Lu, and I quit my estimating job, and went in to teaching at 37,” Anderson said.

In addition to carpentry, law and teaching, Anderson also interned at the Library of Congress in 2011, and hopes to intern at the National Archives and Records Association and the United States Supreme Court.

When asked for advice for students trying to find a career, Anderson simply answered, “My advice is to follow your passion and do what you love.”

Senior English and creative writing teacher Don Enoch encountered his current career a little differently.

After graduating from the University of California, Santa Barbara and directing shows in Los Angeles, Enoch moved to New York to direct a show in the Village.

“I moved to New York to pursue a directing career, and that was the chosen career at that age, and spent 17 years in that business as a stage manager and director, sometimes designing as well,” Enoch said. “I had worked in the Sacramento Music Circus as a designer and a stage manager, and I went off to New York and worked…up and down the east coast in a number of small theaters, directing shows, and made my living as that.”

However, after working up and down the east coast, Enoch realized he needed a change in direction from a life of travel.

“I got to know the girls behind the counter at the Delta Airlines terminal in LaGuardia by name… I’ve gotten a fun career, but it was also kind of wearing after a while,” Enoch said.

Enoch moved back to the west coast, built homes for 10 years and then decided to become a teacher at 48.

“I came to realize that actually, in many ways, directing the play, building the house or teaching was actually all the same type of a career,” Enoch said. “You have a blueprint, or you have a novel or you have a play, and you’re trying to accomplish it with different resources. You may be actors, or you may be students or you may be subcontractors, but you’re trying to accomplish this vision.”

This was not Enoch’s first experience with educating, however.

“I started teaching when I was 21 years old, and I got in front of the middle school kids… and I realized I was not mature enough to be a teacher.”

Though Enoch returned to teaching fairly late in life, his vision for his role as a teacher is extremely clear.

“Look,” Enoch said, ”my objective is to turn out 35 little mini-revolutionaries every day: people who go out and challenge the world as it’s given to them, to question the assumptions about how and why it should work the way it does — agree with it or disagree with it, but at least challenge it.”