Madison Thacker thinks to inspire, educate community

After joining Van Nuys High School’s newspaper The Mirror in her junior year, Madison Thacker prepares for an eventful summer and future as editor-in-chief. 

“Growing up around all these stories and all these different ways to tell these different kinds of stories, really just encouraged me to write my own stories,” Thacker said. “I have a lot of emotions, I have a lot of thoughts always running through my head. So growing up, it really helped me just write everything down, like in a journal, kind of thing, and then it just kind of evolved into stories.”

Journalism helps Thacker practice writing, a favorite skill of hers, but also allows her to network and speak to people. Thacker said she considers herself someone who enjoys speaking to others and learning about them. 

“Everybody just has different perspectives of the world in this different story,” Thacker said. “I like hearing all those different things and I just like being social.”

As a summer intern for the Los Angeles Times High School Insider, Thacker said she’s excited to sharpen her journalistic skills for her upcoming senior year. She said she’s very excited to work on a story about graduation rates in the Los Angeles Unified School District.  

As both a student of LAUSD and someone who hopes to become a teacher, education is incredibly important to Thacker. 

Thacker comes from a large family of educators, so her lifelong dream has always been to enter the workforce as an educator, she said. Thacker hopes to be a teacher in the humanities field, working as either a history or English teacher with high school students, or educating late elementary schoolers. 

“I like teaching,” Thacker said. “It never really was something where I was, like, all of a sudden, ‘Oh, my God, I want to be a teacher.’ I was always helping out other people, and I was always teaching them, and then it just kind of turned into, this is the natural career path for me.”

Thacker hopes as an educator, she will inspire her future students to be passionate about the subjects she teaches. She said she believes the educator is the linchpin to a successful classroom environment and hopes to inspire her students. 

“I feel like there’s a lot of kids out there that would like history and like English a lot more if it was presented in a better way,” Thacker said. “So I want to be a part of that, to help present in a better way for the future.”