Meet your neighbor: Amanda Talley
Published 5:16 pm Monday, August 26, 2013
- 'It's a big year for the kids," Pell City teacher Amanda Talley says of first grade.
Amanda Talley chose her career path early and stuck with it.
“My mom said I came home from kindergarten the first day saying I wanted to be a kindergarten teacher,” she said, seated behind her desk in her upstairs classroom at Iola Roberts Elementary School. It’s first grade rather than kindergarten, but the second-year teacher doesn’t find it any less rewarding.
“I love seeing the children progress and watching how much they grow from the first of the year to the end – learning, this is – not how tall they are, although I see that too.”
A Pell City native who attended elementary school in the same building where she now teaches – and had the opportunity to serve on the faculty with her former first grade teacher, Jennifer Cohron, who retired last year — Talley graduated from Pell City High School in 2008 and finished her education studies at Auburn in 2011.
Contemplating the start of a new school year, she described a typical day in first grade, identified important traits teachers need and shared the best advice anyone ever gave her.
What’s so important about first grade: “It’s a big year for the kids. They learn to read, and they are exposed to a little of everything they’ll need for all the other grades.”
A day in first grade: “We do whole group reading for an hour, and then we divide into our small group centers for an hour and a half to work on math – which is a little bit of everything: addition, subtraction, fractions, telling time and shapes — and the calendar and other things if there’s time. Then we have P.E. Afternoons are always different. Sometimes it’s spent in the computer lab.”
An important quality for teachers to have: “Flexibility. That’s one of the things that I didn’t realize as a new teacher, how flexible you have to be. Things are always changing, and it takes a lot of patience.”
About Iola Roberts: “It’s very special to me to be able to teach at a school I had gone to. I feel like I have an opportunity to give back what the school gave to me when I was here. And it was so nice to teach with Mrs. Cohron during my first year and her last year.”
On her reading list: “I read a lot of Nicholas Sparks, and I read “Gone with the Wind” over the summer last year. I really enjoyed it.”
Her favorite leisure activity: “Crafting. Picture frames and painting and stuff you see on Pinterest. I love Pinterest, but I don’t have much time to craft any more.”
If she were stranded on a desert island with one book, one meal, and one CD, her choices would be: “The Bible, spaghetti and Needtobreathe.”
The best advice she ever received: “Trust in the Lord with everything. Looking back through high school and college and the times when I was struggling most, things always ended up the way He wanted them to.”
