Christine Cox Retires

Christine Cox may not have always wanted to be a teacher, but that has no influence over the number of students she has educated in the 32 years she has worked at Urbana High School. Cox will retire this year, making the class of 2013 the last to have the speech and English teacher.

Cox studied to become a nurse before becoming a teacher. “I thought I’d like to be a nurse,” she says. “I started nursing school and I just didn’t have the stomach for it.”
So career-wise, it was back to the drawing board for Cox. She considered what she might like to do and a speech teacher she had in high school came to mind. “I thought ‘I would love to do that.'”

She began her work by student teaching ninth grade at Jefferson Middle School. Cox then was a substitute teacher at UHS, where she was offered a job.
Thirty-two years after that job offer, Cox continues to teach speech and composition 9 at Urbana. “I love teaching AP prep freshman and I love teaching speech,” she says.
Speech is the subject Cox originally thought about when she decided to become a teacher and is still one she enjoys. “Speech brings together a large group of students from different backgrounds to discuss issue and listen to each other,” says Cox.

Over the years fashions, politics and music may have changed, but Cox says that her students are similar to the way they were in past years. “They’re still teenagers,” she says. “I think everybody wants to pin all of the world’s troubles on them, but that’s not the truth.”