Percy K. Davis

“One of the most rewarding aspects for teaching at Texas A&M Texarkana was the quality of the students,” Associate Professor of English at Texarkana College Pamela Hesser said.

Pamela Hesser taught at A&M for one semester helping out with the journalism program. Her main focus was to help the students be better writers and help them get the online newspaper off the ground.

Before teaching at A&M, Hesser taught journalism at three other schools, Whitehouse High School, Hooks High School, and Texarkana College. She also was an assistant editor at the Texarkana Gazette where she wrote a bundle of feature stories.

When teaching at the high schools and Texarkana College she dealt with a majority of younger students who weren’t for sure what they wanted to do in life and were not as focused on journalism as she was.

“Here at Texarkana College I was teaching freshman and sophomores, some of whom are still exploring what kind of career direction they want to take.”

When you are a freshman you are just what the name says, “fresh”, so you don’t really know what you want to do in life just yet. You just graduated from high school and are making decisions without your parents telling you what decisions to make. You are out of your parents’ home and have free will to do pretty much whatever you want. So you can easily see how a freshman or even a sophomore’s focus could easily be distracted from the classroom.

“Whereas at A&M teaching juniors and seniors, they have already had time to make a pretty firm decision on what they wanted to do. So they are focused and they know what they want to learn and they take advantage of the learning opportunities,” Hesser concluded with a smile.