Ms. Farzaneh Safavi, the Honors American Literature teacher, can be both energetic and chill. She loves to greet her students, loves teaching, and is very interactive. Something special about her class is that she sometimes meows.
“I meow when I’m not pleased with something my students are doing to lighten the mood instead of saying something unpleasant about it,” she said. Also, she loves cats.
Ms. Safavi was born in Iran following the Iranian Revolution in the mid-1980s to 1990s. Growing up in Iran was “a mesh of different things.” Throughout the time she spent in Iran, she was constantly moving.
“Things were changing drastically in the country, given the fact that it was just post-revolution,” she explained.
Ms. Safavi felt that her “home life was very different from what was dictated in society.”
“Going to school in an Islamic country was very different because my house was very secular,” she added.
When she was ten years old, her family moved to Los Angeles, where she spent the rest of her childhood and teenage years.
“I came from a very eastern, very different culture,” she added. “Even though my family wasn’t very religious, they had different ideas about how American teenagers should act.”
Ms. Safavi eventually came to San Francisco to go to undergrad at SF State. Being a high school teacher was not necessarily on Ms. Safavi’s radar, but she knew after college she wanted to travel and teach English.
“I majored in English so then it was my goal,” she explained. “I applied to a bunch of different countries and Naples, Italy, in the south, accepted me. So I went and, at the time, I had no idea about where I was and what kind of country I was in. I didn’t really have any clue, but it was home and I really enjoyed myself.”
After teaching in Italy, Ms. Safavi taught in France, and would soon return to the Bay Area to study for her Master’s at UC Berkeley. Ms. Safavi also taught in New York and Abu Dhabi.
Ms. Safavi speaks a few languages: Spanish, Farsi, Italian, and English. She is also learning Arabic and French. She loves to travel. She’s been to 25+ countries and tries to make at least one or two trips every year. Last year, while Ms. Safavi was on her sabbatical, she traveled to many different countries, including Japan, Spain, Indonesia, and Iran.
“I really loved visiting Egypt and just hanging out by the Nile and, of course, eating such good food. Then I really enjoyed visiting Japan because these two places were the first time I went there.”
In addition to travel, Ms. Safavi also likes to spend time with family, practice yoga or meditation to keep herself balanced, and visit her cabin up north.
“It’s my sacred space where I can go to be with nature in my garden, near a river,” she said. “I also have a cat there. A feral cat which lives in the cabin and protects it until I come home.”
Ms. Safavi is also dedicated to working at Mission High School.
“What keeps me here is really my connection to my students,” she explained. “They really are the way to my lifeline in a sense. It’s one of the only times in my world where I get to be doing things, not for myself, but for others. And that really brings me so much joy… That and seeing my students achieve things.”
