Nikki Cox is a teacher at Northwood High School who currently teaches English II, English IV, and AP English Literature. Ms. Cox is also the former adviser for Northwood’s yearbook class. Cox has taught at Northwood for the past five years, but it is her twelfth year of teaching. She has taught at East Chapel Hill High School, Person High School, Early College East High School and now Northwood High School. While Cox mostly spends her time teaching, she also participates in clubs at the school. Cox occasionally comes to Northwood Book Club meetings and is the advisor for the Northwood Pride Club. Cox also spends time working on organizing meetings with other teachers.
“Teachers have to meet a couple times a month with other teachers who teach the same classes that they do,” said Cox. “And I’m in charge of making sure that happens for the English II teachers.”
One of the main reasons Cox became a teacher was due to the influence teachers had on her along the way as well as getting to help students.
“I think one of the main things that made me want to be a teacher, …is knowing that I can help people every day,” Cox said, “That matters to me in a job. I don’t just mean in a “teaching students English” way either; I mean helping however I can as a person.”
Cox recalls one of her best moments as a teacher when some of her former students got together to celebrate the time Cox spent teaching them after they learned she would be leaving Early College East.
“The last day of school was a big celebration there,” Cox said. “A bunch of the students there, whom I’d known for three years, got together. I’d taught a bunch of them in English IV, where we studied Beowulf. That group of lovely humans recited the first three lines of Beowulf in the original Old English, something I’d taught them in class, as a big goodbye to me.”
For Cox, one of the best parts of teaching is getting to see her students grow and advance in their writing.
“I don’t see myself as a teacher who just teaches books,” Cox said. “We work on communication skills of all kinds that are useful both for future academic purposes and for the workplace. It’s gratifying to see students learn and hone those skills, and I enjoy getting to know each student as a person as we work on those skills.”
