“I want to create relationships with my students, I want them to feel like they matter,” Caitlin Mitchell said passionately as she described how she feels about teaching at Los Medanos College.
Mitchell was the first person in her family to go to college and was the oldest of four kids. Initially, she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do when attending Saint Mary’s College as her biggest motivator was to “go to a small school, something with a small suburban feel.”
This stems from her upbringing in Sonoma County, where she lived in a quiet suburban town where there was only one school, so everyone knew everybody.
In high school, Mitchell was involved in sports as she played basketball, and her love of sports shows in her office, which is decorated with posters of the A’s and Golden State Warriors. This love also showed when she attended Saint Mary’s College, where she traveled with the women’s basketball team for a tournament as a journalist for the school.
However, it wasn’t until she attended graduate school as an English major at Mills University that she discovered her passion for teaching.
“I wanted to read books and talk about them for a job,” she said.
She went straight into teaching college courses, first at Diablo Valley College in San Ramon before getting hired at LMC.
But it was attending Saint Mary’s that taught her a lot about her teaching style, which she bases her current classes on today. When attending small classes, Mitchell said that it’s easier for the teachers to get to know the students and help them feel like they are a part of something.
This keeps her classes active where the students are engaged and ready to participate. As of now, she teaches English-230 Thinking and Writing Critically about Literature, but over her 10 years at LMC, she’s taught every English course. When she taught English 100 and 100S, she said she wanted to support students in becoming college students and get them on the right track since high school is different from college.
In her advanced classes, she focuses on getting students to know themselves as writers. She believes the course will help build a foundation for students to use in all the courses they will end up taking.
Her main goal is to build relationships with her students and she takes it seriously.
“I notice when they’re gone and what they contribute to the class,” Mitchell said.
It’s the students who are Mitchell’s favorite part of working at LMC, and she said that she can see how motivated every student is to get where they want to be.
“Everything here is student-driven. It’s not an institution that keeps people out” she said.
Mitchell said she loves community college so much, because everyone is welcome on a campus like LMC, where there are no requirements, and everyone can find themselves.
“There’s no gatekeeping of who can or can not get in,” she said.
Her passion for LMC leaves her feeling honored as she gets to work for a place that is a service for the community. And for her, it is a place where the door is always open and readily available for people who want to learn.
Though her passion for the campus might go unnoticed by most, a defining characteristic sticks about Mitchell, or more specifically, her office. It’s a white lawn chair that sits in the front, accompanied by a rug and a plant. It has become an interesting sight for most who walk by, as it’s rare to see the outside of a professor’s office decorated, especially like a porch.
Mitchell said it originally started as a decorate your desk, where she decided to do a front porch theme.
“I ended up liking it, so I leaned into the front porch feel,” she said.
Mitchell described her office as an apartment, and the hallway as an entrance into the home-like space. She said that though the chair was originally supposed to be for her, she still loves to see students hanging out in the spot, and it has become useful for her students who wait for her office hours, as well as for students she doesn’t know who just want a homey place to sit.
“It creates a sense that someone is around. Sometimes it can feel too quiet in here,” Mitchell said about the office she’s resided in for six years now, which displays the artwork of her two children, whom she resides with in Oakland, where she spends her time reading fiction novels and listening to audiobooks. She also watches BBC dramas, where she has to put on subtitles to ensure she captures every word through the thick accents.
Mitchell’s attention to detail whether in TV dramas or her career, ensures every student is seen through the crowd, just like the white chair in front of her office.
