What made you decide to go into teaching?

It’s all family related. My parents worked for the local school district. My dad was a custodian, my mom was a teacher’s aide – she worked in the library, as a playground supervisor, wherever they needed her. We grew up in schools, all year round. In the summers and after school, we were cleaning, waxing floors, clearing the blackboard. Because of that, I grew up around teachers; they were my life. I was around a lot of good teachers. So I naturally wanted to keep living that life after I graduated. Initially I wanted to be an elementary librarian. But in my senior year when I took government, I had a great teacher, and that changed my path, so I went into high school social studies.

What’s the best part of teaching?

In a small school district, a small town, when you’re able to commit to that district and community, you can see the seeds of teaching. Sometimes you don’t see those seeds in a day or a year, but if you are around for a long time, you see those kids become good adults and community members.

Building relationships and seeing what those young people go on to become is so rewarding. You read about them in the paper, or you see them on social media, or even better when they come back and tell you. They come back as adults, and you go to their wedding and see them grow and have families of their own. It becomes an extended family, with these young people and hopefully their families. They grow into these amazing adults who are doing great things with their lives in your community, or they branch out and live their lives somewhere else.

What’s the most challenging part of teaching?

There’s the outside education challenge of people who don’t understand how complicated it can be, to successfully teach all students in a community. They see it from the outside, and they get the idea that just one easy solution will solve everything. They don’t see what I see. It’s hard sometimes to explain it to others.

Then there’s the classroom element. Students have a lot going on in their lives. Education is a small part of that puzzle. Meeting students at that given time, with their needs. Over the course of the day, I have over 100 students and they have over 100 different needs, and it can be hard to make sure all those needs are being met.

You led an effort in West Central to bring Native American history and culture to the forefront of the social studies curriculum in your district. Can you speak to the importance of integrating OSEUs into history and other subjects for K-12 students?

At West Central, we’ve had a Native American studies elective for more than 25 years – it was in place before I was there. We had an amazing Native American studies teacher, and he had built this great course with wonderful resources. After he retired, I eventually became the person who taught that class. It’s a really important subject to teach.

It was a great course, but I wanted to make it more than a standalone class. Native American studies isn’t just a social studies class. It should be standards we put into all our classes, regardless of subject or grade level. There’s a breadth, exposure, across the curriculum.

A lot of teachers sometimes are reluctant to put OSEUs (Oceti Sakowin Essential Understandings) into our classrooms because we don’t feel we have the knowledge or skill to do that – we aren’t as familiar as we would like to be with the content. So I applied for and received a grant from the DOE, and with that, we worked at getting the knowledge and skills to the teachers so that they could feel confident teaching the content.

We got funding to get indigenous-related books for the library, and I was able to secure some funding to get a speaker to come for two sessions about the main virtues and traits of the Lakota culture. We had a professional development where we hosted the speaker, and he brought with him copies of The Lakota Way by Joseph Marshall III. He was able to explain each of the virtues through oral stories, how each story relates to a virtue. He would read a story and, from that, teachers were encouraged to run with that in their classes.

I use that in my Native American studies classes, but I’m also on the PBIS committee. We’re going to use those traits in highlighting students who live up to those virtues.

Do you have any, “it’s weird but it works” teaching strategies?

I’m pretty old school. But one thing I know is, the more I can lend my own personal experience to whatever we’re talking about, the better. When you’re able to share firsthand stories about places I have been or things I have done, it brings the content home for them. I think students like to hear your own personal experiences with what you’re talking about in class.

I’m going to go to the history conference in April; I see the focus is on Y2K, I’m looking forward to it. It made me think about that, how that’s something I lived through, that I can talk about. I think there is more validity in sharing those stories than you get credit for. Lots of times, that then sparks conversations at home, and that really helps the kids to retain the information.

I tell the kids make the connections between what we’re learning and what they’re doing in their lives. It tends to stick that way.

What is one thing about teaching that non-teachers don’t know?

A lot of people think that everyone learns like they do. That’s not the way it is. That’s the thing that many non-educators don’t realize. You have to have a variety of tools in your toolkit to make sure you can reach all of your students. Drill is my go-to tool, but I have to have a lot of other tools in there as well. I see that all the time: “This worked for me, why won’t it work for someone else?” Educators know it doesn’t work that way – you have to have a variety of ways to teach so that everyone can get it.