Sunshine McFaul remembers parking in the teachers’ lot at Grant High School last October. Coughing from the flu, she felt ready for a long-awaited interview for a teaching position in the English department.
It’s rare for jobs to open up midyear, but when Grant received extra funding after school started, administrators looked for a new English teacher to reduce class sizes.
She pulled out a binder she refers to as “McFaul’s Happy Stuffs.” It was two inches thick and filled with adoring notes and letters from her past students.
“I cannot begin to explain my gratitude and respect towards you,” and “I can’t see how I could have survived without you,” some of the passages read.
She gathered herself. “I wouldn’t have the binder of letters or thank you’s if I was not doing what I needed to be doing,” she remembers thinking.
As McFaul walked through the hallways, her excitement mounted. As she entered the office, she was on the verge of getting a job at her dream school.
“The route that it took me to get to this place has been so challenging and so hard,” she says. “People don’t keep pursuing things if it’s not what they’re meant for.” -Sunshine McFaul
Today, McFaul is three months into the job and she’s beginning to integrate herself into the Grant community. Working with new students in a new environment can be hard, but McFaul has never shied away from a challenge.
From the time in college she was told to skip the idea of teaching to getting her first job as substitute for inner-city Chicago sixth graders, McFaul has worked hard to reach this point. She meets every problem with: “What can I do better?”
The older of two girls, McFaul was born in Kronenwetter, Wisc. She was always smiling, her parents say. Her mother, Sue McFaul, remembers taking her to food shows that the family would hold at the grocery store her father managed.
Only 3 at the time, she had all of the vendors “wrapped around her finger,” her mother recalls. Her talkative and polite nature won her bags of free candy at the end of the day.
Sunshine McFaul began reading at that age. She and her mother would bike to the library and leave with stacks of books. One of McFaul’s earliest memories is checking out “Mr. Happy” and “Little Miss Sunshine,” the books most of her friends were reading at the time, only to be stopped by the librarian.
The librarian marched McFaul over to the section for older kids and introduced her to the Nancy Drew series. After speeding through the series, McFaul was never without a book. “It just takes that one book to change everything,” she says.
Her passion for reading quickly turned into an enthusiasm for learning. By the time she reached high school, teachers were taking notice. “She was the kind of student who would get super excited about a wonderfully drawn ellipse,” recalls her high school chemistry teacher, Bill Heeren.
During McFaul’s senior year, most of her friends had loaded up their schedules with easy classes and study halls. McFaul, on the other hand, decided to take on advanced biology and physics. She never had a free period through her four years of high school.
“I just wanted to learn as much as I could,” says McFaul. “Academia is my home. I feel safe and happy and fulfilled when I’m pushing myself and trying to improve myself.”
After graduating, she attended the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. Her goal? To pursue a teaching credential. When she got there, however, she hit a wall. She realized she was not as prepared as she had hoped.
She struggled with writing essays and would have to revise drafts countless times for her literature teachers. She realized her time at high school hadn’t prepared her for the next step. “I always felt really dumb, especially in literature classes, when everyone was always saying these profound things,” recalls McFaul.
At the end of her junior year, her faculty advisor told her to rethink her career choice. McFaul, who was already nervous about taking the mandatory speech classes, took her advice. “I thought maybe I’m not meant to be a teacher because I can’t use commas effectively,” she says.
After graduating from Eau Claire in 1998 with a literature degree, McFaul moved to Chicago and was hired as a sales representative for a ceiling and flooring company.
At first, she loved her job. She spent a month in Pennsylvania learning how to sell and install her product. McFaul remembers arriving at Home Depot (her biggest client) at 10 p.m., just after the store closed. Toting a toolbox, she worked along with a crew of other employees until 4 a.m. to replace the flooring unit displays.
After a few months, McFaul began to find her work monotonous. “There is only so much you can learn about ceilings and floors,” she says now.
About a year into her sales job, she began thinking about becoming a teacher again. She looked into the Teach for America program but it wasn’t until she was at an adult-league volleyball game that she learned more.
She struck up a conversation with a man she saw grading papers in the bleachers. He told her about a long-term substitute teacher position at the school where he taught. It was a charter school, so McFaul could start right away without her teaching credential.
After a brief trial period, she got the job. Though McFaul was overjoyed to be teaching, her new job was exhausting. From an hour-long bus ride in the morning to pouring over lesson plans at night, McFaul’s days were packed and often unrewarding.
She was now responsible for a classroom full of rowdy sixth graders who had inspired the three substitutes before her to quit.
“There were attitudes and defiance, not liking authority, not caring about learning at all,” McFaul recalls. “There was just so much going on at home that they would bring it into the classroom.”
McFaul doesn’t fault the students. Instead, she described the incredibly challenging setting in which they were trying to learn. 97 percent of her students received free or reduced lunches and many were not eating much at home.
One day, the police swarmed her classroom and stood on the students’ chairs. A drug bust was happening across the street and they needed the room to survey the area.
McFaul persevered. She met problems in her classroom by researching new teaching methods at the local library and discussing issues with fellow teachers. “Even on my worst days, when I would be bawling all the way home, I was not going to let it get me,” she says.
She spent two years at the school but lost her job because federal rules required a certain number of teachers to have particular credentials. Unphased, she returned to Eau Claire and earned her credentials. Along the way, she met Louie Amadoro online. The two of them hit it off.
After getting certified, she decided to move to Portland where Amadoro worked. Four years later, they got married. Once in Portland, McFaul began looking for teaching positions right away and worked at several schools. The jobs were hard to come by, but she was determined.
When work evaded her in Portland, she took a three-month job as a substitute at her old high school in Wisconsin. McFaul remembers walking down the hall and having flashbacks of waiting for friends at her locker. When she saw her old algebra teacher in the hall, she couldn’t bring herself to call him by his first name.
Heathrina Stanfield, a colleague at her last school – Leadership and Entrepreneurship Public Charter School in Northeast Portland, remembers McFaul’s dedication. The school didn’t have Shakespeare in the curriculum, so McFaul asked each of her students pick a play. She created a unique curriculum to fit each student’s reading level.
Today, she teaches six classes at Grant but still manages to go back to the charter school to lead conferences. Though she misses her old students, McFaul is excited to be a part of a bigger school that offers more opportunities.
“The vibe that I get is so different from any school that I’ve been a part of,” she says of her job now. “It’s very similar to what I knew in Wisconsin. It feels like home.”
Kate Brandy, a Grant English teacher McFaul worked with to design curriculum, describes how quickly McFaul has adjusted. When she first arrived, her classroom was without filing cabinets, chairs, a teacher’s desk, or a functioning phone, Brandy recalled.
Now her walls are covered with posters and inspirational quotes. Books she brought from her personal collection for her students to use are packed into the room. “I can’t imagine how many hours she has logged just in these first couple of months,” Brandy says.
McFaul sees herself teaching far into the future. Her ultimate goal is to find a “forever home” at a school, which means a place that will keep challenging her. “In my journey, nothing has been easy but it’s all what I love,” she says. “The challenge of every experience I’ve had has changed me and made me who I am.” ◊
