Mrs. Farina is a biology teacher who has been teaching at HAHS for 13 years, with this one being year 14. She balances having two sons of her own and teaching things like infectious diseases, AP Biology, and SB Biology. Farina graduated high school from Northern Lehigh High School, and graduated college at Cedar Crest College in Allentown. Other than at Hamburg, Farina taught at Exeter, Governor Mifflin, and Kutztown. However, she only taught at each for half a school year.
Outside of school, Mrs. Farina takes care of her two sons: Harrison, who is in first grade, and Oliver, who is in preschool. She named her sons after characters in Harry Potter due to her love for the series. Outside of school, she enjoys things like crafting, photography, and traveling wherever and whenever she can. Specifically, she has traveled to Egypt to study the culture and spent a whole summer visiting national parks before having her first child. She visited places like Devil’s Tower, Badlands, and Glacier National Park. She currently has Italy, Greece, South Africa, and the Galapagos Islands on her list of places she visited.
Before she was a teacher, Farina worked at Staples all through college, mainly in the copy department. She also worked at a science summer camp for three years that was run by the DaVinci Science Center in Allentown, with this summer camp being how she met her husband. Her favorite thing about teaching is seeing kids make connections that he or she might have not made on their own, like making friends through working on a project. The reason she teaches biology is because she was already a biology major and always liked biology, but specifically, medicine. When Mrs. Farina decided she did not want to go pre-med, she decided on being a biology teacher, because she wanted to work with kids, and loved biology and medicine, so, she fell into becoming a biology teacher.
Out of all the classes she teaches, her favorite is the infectious diseases class because of her adoration for medicine. Mrs. Farina was always fascinated by diseases and why they make people sick. The class is offered as a dual enrollment course with RACC after completing biology, if students were interested in getting four college credits. The class studies epidemiology, viruses, bacteria, and the body’s immune system. The class focuses heavily on lab skills used in medical and microbiology laboratories. Students also end up having the opportunity to conduct scientific research at Penn State, which can end up being published in databases and can help with college experience.
