Carissa Maseberg was a student teacher at Arvada West High School 5 years ago. Now, an A-West student may look at her and think that she is just a math teacher in the lower north corner of the school, but there is so much more to her. She is actually a math teacher who loves what she teaches, and loves working with Sparkles alongside Ms. Miller on Mondays and Wednesdays every week.

Maseberg teaches geometry honors and pre-calculus, and she is involved with the Sparkles Club. She explains, “Sparkles is just a cheer team that has students with and without disabilities.”

She enjoys being involved with Sparkles and she found her first interest in it around five years ago. “When I was student teaching here, I think it was five or six years ago, I saw them [Sparkles] at an assembly and I was almost in tears because I was just amazed.”

She fell in love with the Sparkles club almost instantly. Maseberg’s favorite part about working with sparkles is watching the peer coaches interact and enjoy the time they have with the sparkles. She says, “It’s so cool to me that students in our school want to get to know them and want to work with them and they would treat them just like their best friends.”

Because of her enjoyment in this, Mondays have become one of her favorite days to be at school. Seems odd right? She just found something she enjoyed and pursued it.

Before Maseberg was a math teacher here at A-West, she went to Colorado State University as a dance major. She says, “That was a joke, but everyone has to do those things in life.”

She was not sure what she was going to do, so she took dance and she minored in business. She enjoyed it for around five months before she “got back to reality and found a real career.”

Then, she went to Metro State University and graduated with a teaching degree.

Maseberg, with everything else she does for the school and Sparkles, is still taking classes at the University of Northern Colorado. She is in her master’s program right now for what is called special education, but it is an emphasis on gifted and talented students. She connects her life at A-West with her college classes by recording them and showing them to her college classes.

Maseberg is actually living a very eventful life, and she enjoys what she does. Not only does she teach math, but she instructs the Sparkles club, and is working towards her master’s.