Dozens of students choose to take the popular Advanced Placement (AP) Psychology class at Oviedo every year. Students returning from their long summer breaks—maybe wishing they were longer—walk into room 8-018 on the first day of school, greeted by the school’s resident psychology teacher, Hildreth House.   

Psychology is defined as the scientific study of behavior, the mind, the brain and everything in between. The subject is specifically interesting to House, thus her job title. 

“I love psychology,” House said. “I love the fact that students get to learn more about themselves. And you can do this in other classes, too. But that is the one thing I do enjoy about psychology is that it’s human behavior—I feel like it helps us understand each other better. And maybe we’re less quick to judge and maybe we are kinder to people.”

To House, teaching goes farther than vocabulary, an “A” grade or a perfect score on a test. The filing cabinet in the left hand corner of the room is topped off with pictures of honor-grad photos. The wall to the left of her personal desk in her classroom is lined with former student’s graduation party invites. A “Best Advice Giver” award is hung up on the bulletin board on the same wall. 

“When I tell you guys to make good choices, you know, it’s coming from an area of a mom-ish, a guiding area of concern,”House said. “I do care for you guys. I hope that you make good choices. And if you don’t, well, that’s OK, [that’s] part of life.”

Along with mementos from students who House has impacted through her teaching are photos of family and friends. One of these friends is fellow AP and social studies educator Kimberly McKernan. 

McKernan arrived at Oviedo in 2012, House followed shortly after. Since then, they’ve been the best of friends, even outside of school, bonding by conversing between classes back when their rooms paralleled each other in the hallway. Cruises through blue water and hikes through Germany’s Black Forest come to McKernan’s mind when reminiscing on her favorite memories with her friend.

“Hiking through there [the Black Forest] and just the two of us being together, just cracking and bluffing and also enjoying the scenery and just being there,” McKernan said. 

The pair visited Europe for the first time this summer on a school field trip with Oviedo’s AP Human Geography students.

Opposites attract, right? One could say the two fill each other’s “complementary needs”: a psychological concept in which a person seeks friendships with differing perspectives or complementary personalities. 

“The oil and vinegar, the yin and the yang, I think that she’s very quiet and reserved and I’m very out there and boisterous and whatever,” McKernan said. “I think that we complement each other and I push her to be a little bit more out there and she tells me, ‘All right, you gotta calm down in this situation or you gotta take a breather first.’”

Along with her friends, House cares deeply for her family, a trait McKernan thinks helped bring them together.

“Her family is very important to her—I think also our faith and our beliefs are very much so similar in the sense that we raise our children in a similar way and focus on our family and our marriage, that that [is] also is something that connects us,” McKernan said. 

Her eldest son of two, sophomore David House, roams the same halls as his mother, and the two have a unique relationship—not everyone gets the idiosyncratic experience of being the child of a teacher, much less walking the same premises each day.

The idea of having a familial relationship to teaching, however, isn’t new to House. A great deal of her family members growing up were in education. It was a familiar, but not a particularly encouraged option.

“Even though my mom said, ‘Do not do this,’ I had the bug. I don’t know how else to explain it,” House said. “I went to observe classrooms and even student teaching, I just really enjoyed interacting with the students and I fell in love with teaching. Although I already kind of had the love, my love grew.”

She went on to earn her bachelor’s degree in socialized education at Southeastern Louisiana University, a small school in Hammond, Louisiana, her home state. She then earned her master’s degree in educational leadership at St. Leo University in Tampa. 

Naturally, teaching is not a job that is particularly easy to ‘keep at work.’ It takes excessive planning, effort and thoughtfulness. It also takes immense emotional endeavor.

“I try not to bring so much home, [I’m] trying to be more present when I am at home,” House said. 

Cutting, gluing, writing lesson plans for the upcoming week, creating assignments. Much of this part of the job happens at home.

“I wish people saw how hard she [House] works in and out of school,” said D. House.

The job is not only demanding, but sometimes societally challenging as well, especially with the social implications and cultural bounds of teaching. AP Psychology came under fire in 2023, when a new Florida law effectively blocked certain units of the course. For a time, the school was unsure whether AP Psychology could continue.

“I’m just here trying to do my job. I’m not indoctrinating anybody. [I] don’t have an agenda. And that’s when that is kind of difficult,” House said. “So it’s moments like that [that are hard]. That is not really an Oviedo thing, but more of a societal issue.”

Though there are difficult moments, 24 years of teaching—and counting—do help with dealing with the tough parts of the job. But before she was ever a teacher, she was an adolescent, growing up and attending school in Louisiana. It was there where her interest in teaching high school grew, due to two very influential teachers. At a time when House was going through something unfavorable, they were there to lighten the load. 

“Miss Clary and my high school U.S. History teacher, Miss Spangler, those were the ones that kind of solidified that I wanted to be a high school teacher—I felt like those teachers were OK with the fact that they didn’t know me from a sibling, but they really got to know me,” House said. “The way that they ran their room, I felt like was fair or equitable. I felt like they cared. Like it wasn’t just a paycheck. Like they really cared about us.”

Her experience with those two teachers is what led her to be so caring and meaningful in the way she leads her career. 

“She cares about her subject and her students,” D. House said.

Her first official teaching job was in the early 2000s, working at an all-girls private school in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, which was, for the time, very technologically advanced. One-to-one laptops were pioneered there, being one of the first schools to do it. Teaching the students code and programming skills to assist other students with laptop troubles was a detail House particularly remembers.

“[It was] lots of fun! I mean, I really did enjoy teaching there,” House said. 

When she moved to Florida from Louisiana, she worked at Bishop Moore Catholic High School, one of Oviedo’s athletic rivals. There, she honed her craft by teaching economics (and deciding it most definitely was not for her) and moved to Oviedo in the mid 2010s. Throughout her tenure at this school, she has moved from AP U.S. History, to AP World History, and eventually to AP Psychology. She found a home here in Oviedo’s ‘pride’ of teachers.

“[People say] ‘Students come here [Oviedo] from other schools because of the teachers,’ OK, blah, blah, blah. You hear that. But as a parent now, I wholeheartedly believe it, that there are so many wonderful teachers here—some of them, to be honest with you, I’m in awe with,” House said. “Because they have patience for my child that I would not have,” she joked.

From the bayou to the swamp, House has made an impact everywhere she goes. She’s a beloved part of the Oviedo community. And year after year, new students will walk into what they think is just another boring AP class and will find out that it’s much more than that. It’s a result of years of hard work to make the classroom a caring and supportive place and a passionate person’s life’s work.