Dr. Helen
Dr. Helen
Panda News Network, Journalism Director
Panda News Network, Journalism Director
“Never give up, never stop working towards your goals, and just know that sleep is overrated!”
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Dr. Helen, one of the amazing teachers at University Preparatory High School (UPHS), runs the UPHS Journalism class and supervises the Bamboozle, PNN, and Literary Magazine productions. Recently, she received her Doctorate in Instruction Design and Development from George Fox University! This is currently her 25th year of teaching and her 11th year of teaching at UPHS.
A long time ago in a town far away in Monterey Bay, a young girl, who her mother named Helen, was born. Her love of reading and imagination led to many daydreams and adventures with her imaginary friends. While aspects of school captured her love of stories, other parts such as spelling words, were tedious and unneeded. Although her teachers did not see her potential as a child, her parents believed the world was hers for the taking and just encouraged Helen to be her own person who simply did her best work and treated others with kindness.
Helen’s first exposure to the world of journalism happened during high school when she was chosen for the yearbook class. In those days, back when dinosaurs walked the Earth, pictures were taken using a 35-millimeter camera, developed at a lab, all yearbook pages were hand-drawn, and captions were handwritten. Computers did not exist! Nevertheless, this experience led Helen to UC Davis where she wrote for the CRESS Center, the education center at UC Davis.
After completing her teaching credential, Helen worked on Team Spectrum at Arcade Fundamental Middle School teaching 8th grade English and Spanish 1. Then, Cupid shot his arrow and Helen fell in love with Mark Feller, whom she married in the church where they met in Davis, California. Then, the god of fate struck moving Helen from her beloved college town of Davis to the Central Valley of California. As a newlywed, Helen started her new teaching job at Wilson Middle School in Exeter, California. In May 2000, the stork brought Alexandra Louise into Helen’s life and then February 2004 the stork visited again bringing Holden James into the Feller home. Helen’s life became busy with children, teaching, soccer, swimming, and so much more! Fast forward to 2009 when John Kelly asked Helen to help him start a dual enrollment high school at College of the Sequoias. The rest of the story, as they say, is history.
Dr. Helen aspires that each year students learn to run and manage a production team that produces an amazing product such as a yearbook, video yearbook, newspaper, magazine, PSA, or news show for the student body. She also wants students to learn a variety of skills connected to the field of journalism and media studies!
On her downtime, Dr. Helen likes to read or binge on Netflix or Amazon Prime.
Some words that best describe her are: Ambitious, Dedicated, Caring, Academic, and Absent-minded.
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