Following the retirement of Richard Sharp, who left Manual’s staff at the end of the first semester, Ms. Adia Norris (Social Studies) has been hired to teach his classes: Honors Political Science and AP World History.
Norris has been a teacher for 22 years, with her most recent teaching job being at Atherton High School. After leaving the position, she took advantage of a program offered by Humana to become certified in web design. She worked as a Full Stack Software Engineering Intern for eight months. But when the Manual position opened and web design positions did not, she took the teaching job.
Norris is originally from Santa Barbara, California and attended Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. She has only lived in Louisville for 7 years.
“I initially wanted to be an attorney but certain aspects of law, they were pretty boring, and the people I saw practicing law didn’t look like me, they didn’t sound like me, they didn’t think like me,” Norris said.
Instead, Norris worked for an organization called Students Talk About Race at Venice High School in Los Angeles. The organization focused on facilitating discussions between high school students and their communities. Norris believes that starting civil discourse from multiple perspectives is one of the most important things about teaching history. Hearing from multiple perspectives will shape the students to become better decision makers when they go out into the world. Civil discourse also leads to advocacy and activism, which she values highly.
“If you like the way things are going, well, then you still need to communicate that, and if you don’t like it, what are you empowered to do about it?” At Venice High School, most students were low middle class and lived in neighborhoods that had significant amounts of race-based violence. She felt compelled to pursue teaching as a career after witnessing her students’ day-to-day difficulties. One senior at Venice High decided not to apply to college despite her 3.7 GPA, another young man enlisted in the military because he figured he wouldn’t be able to support his family any other way, and a freshman who was wheelchair bound after taking a bullet for her boyfriend, who left her before she was discharged from the hospital.
“So I thought, ‘oh yeah’, all they need is information, and when they have information, they’ll make better decisions… Broadening their horizons about how other people live and opportunities that they actually had,” Norris said. She recalls that this approach has worked on a student by student basis.
“I am helping the students to make smaller changes that ultimately result in a different life trajectory,” she said.
After deciding to become a teacher, Norris taught in the Los Angeles Unified School District for 15 years. When she decided to move to Louisville to get a doctorate at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Although she did not graduate from the program, she continued to live in Louisville and soon got a job at Atherton High.
“I do my best to care for myself with intention, mentally, physically, relationally, all the things,” Norris said.
In Norris’ personal life, she loves to travel, bake, and listen to music. “I’m trying to get into hospitality. I’m thinking about enlightenment salons, just having a place for people to come from different professions and different walks of life to talk about the world and figure out what they’re gonna do about it,” Norris said.
