Mrs. Kiella - 2nd Grade

Barbara Jo Hines
June 1962
This is a picture of me making cookies when I was in second grade. My Uncle Dick, a dentist and amateur photographer took it during one of our summer visits home to Michigan. I am the daughter of a United States Air Force career officer. My dad was a pilot. I love my dad! We lived in many different states in this country as well as countries in Europe and Asia. Unknown to me at the time, I had already begun the process of becoming a teacher: in a rather dramatic way, I observed that this world is made up of very different kinds of people. My mother insisted that I understand and appreciate those differences in cultures and people. Each of us comes into this world, our town, and my classroom as a unique individual. That uniqueness is to be respected, developed, and celebrated! There are no cookie-cutter children…nor should there ever be.

I have been fortunate to spend most of my life in a classroom: elementary and secondary schools here and abroad, undergraduate college at Western Michigan University, graduate school at Western Michigan University, Michigan State University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and now my 29th teaching-year at Dawson Elementary. I have been blessed!

I have come to believe that real learning usually doesn’t happen in the vacuum of orderly rows and silence. Teaching is active:

"The first idea that the child must acquire in order to be actively disciplined is that of the difference between good and evil; and the task of the educator lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility, and evil with activity. Our aim is to discipline for activity, for work, for good, not for passivity, not for obedience."
~Maria Montessori

Teaching has an amazing impact on a child’s life:

A person may make mistakes,
But isn’t a failure until he starts blaming others.
We must believe in ourselves,
And some where along the road of life
We must meet someone who sees greatness in us,
Expects it from us and lets us know it.
It is the golden key to success.
~Dr. Mel Levine
2001 All Kinds of Minds Conference, Chapel Hill, NC

I believe that teaching is challenging:

The problem is fundamental. Put twenty or more children of roughly the same age in a little room, confine them to desks, make them wait in lines, make them behave. It is as if a secret committee, now lost to history, had made a study of children and, having figured out what the greatest number were least disposed to do, declared that all of them should do it.
~ Tracy Kidder
“Among School Children”

This page was last edited on: 09/10/2007 08:30 PM