About Your Teacher

I currently hold a Bachelors of Science and Human Services, Masters of Arts in Education Elementary Teacher Education, and I am 1 test away from my Masters in Biology. I graduated high school as a third grader due to challenges with dyslexia and an education system, at the time, that found it easier to file me away as stupid than recognize I had a disability.

Dyslexia has proven to be a curse in my younger years and a blessing as an educator. Most students will go through their primary educational years without as much as a hiccup. Moreover, honestly, most of these kids could, while not as enriching, learn what they need to know from instructional video. However, there are many students that know inside they are not stupid but just can’t seem to connect with generic “vanilla” teaching that works for most students. My personal experience is what allows me to recognize the subtle non-verbal struggles that these children face.

Struggling through my twenties, I learned more about my own disabilities and that learning cannot always be vanilla for every student. This realization moment is what drove me to learn what I missed in primary education and to become a teacher serving up more than just vanilla education.

My first degree, Bachelors of Science in Human Services (psychology/social work), gives me the insight to understand the emotional struggles that challenged students face. This is important because just like a vanilla education system that leaves students behind, not everyone’s emotional struggles have vanilla fixes. My struggles had their own flavor just as each student’s struggles have their own individual flavor.

A Masters of Arts in Education Elementary Teacher Education is best summed up as a course in communication. As we grow older, we lose our ability to understand the mind of an elementary student. Adults make logical connections to things that seem completely obvious, but are mind boggling to the young developing mind of a child. Often times this communication block can be very difficult until we understand that children’s developing minds are not fully wired until much later in life.

Combining my own educational and learning challenges, my understanding of psychology, and a Masters in Elementary Education has proven invaluable over the years. For example, a student I will refer to as Sue, arrived in my fifth grade class at an educational level of beginning first grade. Sue suffered from extreme dyslexia and a vanilla education system bent on the notion that we just have to push her harder in phonics reading. For five years the vanilla education system kept telling her to try harder and somehow this kid hadn’t given up, but inside she couldn’t help wondering if she was stupid. In this student, I saw myself. Like her, everyone kept telling me to try harder with phonics. What no one could understand, and when I was this little girl, I could not articulate it as I can now. When a dyslexic sees the word bug or dug no matter how hard we try to phonically read the word we still see it as bug and will say bug even if it says dug because we do not see it correctly.

Drawing from all my experience and education, I worked with this student and her parents throughout her fifth and sixth grade years. By the time she left elementary school she had passed her end of year testing as proficient. I am not a miracle worker, and not every student can make this kind of a turn around that is not committed, but as a teacher I recognized vanilla was not right for this student. And while I proudly toot my horn, the real credit goes to this little girl who wouldn’t give up and be labeled as stupid. As one colleague put it, “I’ve never seen a student so eager to fall on her face and get back up to try again.”

My part? Knowing when to serve up something other than vanilla and to keep trying until I find the right flavor of education for that student’s success

Effective education has three basic principles: expectations, discipline, and consequences. Like a coach pushing us to give our all, as a teacher I believe students will live up to the expectations we put forth. Low expectations and students will achieve low. High expectations an/d children will not only soar, but also know that they can achieve far greater than they realized. As a teacher, it is my tasking to teach children to soar and consequently my expectations will always be high.