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May 25, 2006
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May 25, 2006 |
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Faith Skidmore kept learning by teaching
As a child, Faith Skidmore never aspired to be a teacher when she grew up. Teaching was what her mother did, and her aunt, and her great-grandmother, and she wanted instead to follow her own path, which was music. But, taking her mother’s advice, Skidmore received a teaching certificate while in college — just to have something to fall back on. Now coming to the end of almost 40 years teaching children, Skidmore said she is grateful that she found her own way to join the family profession. “As a teacher, you continue to learn,” she said in an interview last week. “The children teach you something new every day. It keeps you young.” At the end of the school year, Skidmore will retire from her long career as a Yellow Springs teacher. Currently, she teaches Mills Lawn’s third-grade students, with whom, she said, she especially enjoys spending her days. “The children are old enough to read and can do a lot of things, but they still have a lot of innocence, a lot of acceptance,” she said. But if you suggest that third graders might be her favorite group of children, Skidmore will quickly correct you. Perhaps more than any other Yellow Springs teacher, Skidmore can claim to know the unique gifts of all ages of children. When she first moved to Yellow Springs in 1972, she taught music at Morgan Middle School for three years before taking time off to have her own children. When her oldest son was a toddler, Skidmore started a nursery school, and she directed the Community Children’s Center for a year. With her children getting older, Skidmore decided to try teaching at the elementary school level, and in 1985 she worked as an intervention tutor at Mills Lawn, and then held the same job at Morgan Middle. She and her husband, Charles, next lived in Germany for six years, during which she taught kindergarten, and when they returned to Yellow Springs in 1993 she returned to Mills Lawn. Since then she has taught fourth grade, a combined class of third and fourth, then first grade, then second and now third. She has also worked as a long-term substitute at Yellow Springs High School. “Every age you teach has something different to offer that’s special,” she said. A lot has changed in the teaching profession since she began in Plattsburg, N.Y., in 1968, Skidmore said. For instance, she said, the growing influence of state standardized testing and the federal No Child Left Behind Act have placed complex demands on teachers. While Skidmore said the state tests can benefit children by helping teachers focus on the basics of reading and math, the tests also take away time from other subjects, such as music and art, which enrich children in different ways. In addition, she said, teachers are forced to spend considerable amounts of time doing paperwork and keeping up with continual changes in state standards. “It’s harder to be a teacher now,” she said. But even though the job has changed in ways that she doesn’t always like, Skidmore said she has no doubt that she will miss it. She loves her interactions with her Mills Lawn colleagues, she said, and she will miss the children. She takes great pleasure in living in town so that she can see her former students growing up, she said, and after several decades of teaching, she is now teaching the children of some of her former students. But Skidmore will always find time to have children in her life, and after retiring she plans to keep active in the after-school program she started at her church, Yellow Springs United Methodist. She also teaches music at the church, as well as serving as organist. What she most looks forward to after her retirement, Skidmore said, is spending more time with her own grandchildren. An avid reader, Skidmore also said she will take great pleasure in reading late into the night without worrying about turning out the light, going to sleep and waking up early in the morning. Contact: dchiddister@ysnews.com
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