Guadalupe Cruz
Crimson Chronicle Reporter
Leighton Milton is a social sciences teacher in SAS who has diverse experiences beyond his role as a teacher.
Milton has gone through many obstacles throughout his life that eventually changed and affected his current personality, from getting a football scholarship to the University of Arizona, graduating from college, winning the championship, obtaining the ring, playing against Dwayne Johnson (The Rock), going through training for the army, undergoing family obstacles, and becoming a teacher.
Throughout his classes, Milton shares many aspects of his life with students to get to know them on a personal level.
One common story Leighton tells that most of his students are familiar with is when he played against The Rock in college and won the overall championship.
It was Miami vs. Arizona in the 1994 Fiesta Bowl. Mr. Milton was playing for Arizona while The Rock was playing for Miami. The Arizona Wildcats had shut out the Miami Hurricanes with a score of 29-0 later on winning it as a whole and obtaining the ring.
”One day of The Rock’s life belongs to me,” said Leighton Milton.
Another unique aspect of the teacher is his involvement in various commercials. One commercial he shows his students is known as, “ The Big Man vs. The Big Burrito,” and the other as “ The Nine Romantic Getaways around LA.” He claims to do this because he tries to get his students to relax and have fun and if allowed to do this again he would.
Milton’s educational career started as becoming a substitute then moved on to being a fifth-grade elementary school teacher long term for three years. He then became a middle school P.E. teacher. After that later on, he took the social studies test and finally became a history teacher.
His teaching style in the classroom is in a way influenced by his favorite government and Asian culture/U.S. history teacher. His teachers did make them do work but they were also laid back. He claims that this lets them feel relaxed because they know you can’t teach a classroom full of stressed-out students.
His teachers would tell interesting stories that their students would learn from and made their class interesting as a whole because they were so interactive with their students.
The philosophy that he ended up obtaining from them was that “When people graduate high school they talk about all the good and fun times they had in high school that they remember.”
”It’s kind of nice if as a teacher I was a part of that conversation,” said Milton.