Kelly Emminger

King Elementary School, 1st grade, Teacher for 10 years

Teacher Kelly Emminger | Photo by Jason Colston

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Why did you become a teacher?

I started off with Teach for America 10 years ago. Very soon after I started teaching ─ even when things were falling apart in the classroom ─ I realized that I really enjoyed teaching and wanted to get it right. When things did click, I knew this was what I wanted to do.

I loved the students and working with them, but I also liked organizing information, finding new ways to present it, developing assessments…I loved all of the mechanics of teaching. I did have to work to get better at it though.

Who was your favorite teacher and why?

Ms. Intriago was my teacher for the sixth, seventh and eighth grades. She taught Language Arts and Social Studies.

She introduced topics and subject matter and approaches to thinking in ways I had never experienced before. We were studying world cultures and world literature and I had known almost nothing about any of it.

She made it so accessible and opened up the world to me. Every day was exciting and interesting in her class.

Three adjectives that describe your job:

Complex, exciting, eventful.

What is one thing that you wish someone had told you when you were a first year teacher?

I wish someone would have told me how important organization is for everything, the classroom, your thinking, planning…I quickly figured out that if you aren’t organized, everything falls apart. But I wish I knew that on day one.

What's one thing your students have taught you about being a better teacher?

They have taught me that I have to make connections between what they are learning and their personal experiences. If I don’t promote that connection then learning is very difficult to achieve.

Tell a little about a time when a student's accomplishments completely exceeded your expectations. Or, tell a little about a time when you were inspired by a student.

Every year around January is when something clicks with the kids who were struggling with reading at the beginning of the year. I remember this jump in particular with one student. She was meeting with me daily and she was in a daily reading group, which she hated because she wanted to be a reader and wanted it to happen now, but it wasn’t.

The jump from not getting it, to getting it, was so striking with her. One day she was struggling, reading word-by-word, and the next day she was reading sentence-by-sentence, which sounded an awful lot like—reading! She had worked so hard, and I had told her it would pay off, but she didn’t believe me until she could do it.

Those moments are priceless, when something that seemed to the student unlikely to happen does happen. It is hard to convince a 6 year-old of this when to her it feels like nothing is happening. Even for me, when I knew cognitively that it was going to happen, when it actually happens it is magical.

Why is teaching an incredibly important job?

You asked the question about the favorite teacher, and we all have favorite teachers, and it is usually because those teachers open up the world to you. Families do this as well, but it is often teachers who take you into something else.

To be taken outside of your own experiences in a safe, exciting way is so important for kids. They will have to experience this anyway, but to do it in an intellectually rigorous and safe way... every kid deserves that experience, and good teaching can provide it for them.

Inside DCPS Highlights.