Learning on the job

School District 6 welcomes a number of new teachers this year, and not the least among them are two student teachers, Andrea Faulkner and Ron Benton.

Both Faulkner and Benton are Columbia Falls natives. Faulkner is teaching kindergarten at Canyon Elementary and Benton is teaching English at Columbia Falls High School.

For both CFHS grads, it was their teachers who inspired them to become teachers themselves. Both hope to make a difference in their students’ lives.

“I had really great teachers growing up,” Faulkner said. “My primary teachers were really awesome. They were inspiring and caring. I want to be to kids what they were to me.”

Faulkner is a 2005 graduate of CFHS. She plans to earn her elementary education degree from the University of Great Falls in May 2011. She is interning in Jean Fisher’s classroom.

“Jean has set me up to be awesome,” Faulkner said. “She is so explicit. She says ‘This is how you breathe when you’re doing this.’ She’s set me up to succeed.”

Faulkner said her favorite experience with students so far has been Johnny Appleseed Day.

“We made applesauce in the classroom,” she said. “Even the kids who don’t like fruit loved it. Those are the things I remember about school. It’s fun to do projects that are big and boisterous.”

Faulkner got an introduction to educating early in life. Her mother and grandmother are teachers. She wonders if her nephew Nakia Alexander, of whom she has guardianship, will follow suit.

Ideally, Faulkner wants to teach somewhere other than where she grew up for a while. But she’s got Nakia, a freshman at CFHS, to consider before making those plans. She’s unwilling to uproot his life yet and so, if teaching positions are unavailable in the area next spring, she’ll wait. She’s working at Hu Hot in Kalispell besides teaching all day.

“I want to get him to college, then the rest of my life is mine,” she said. “If I give him a couple of years of my focus, I can give him the tools to succeed. I had to grow up a lot quicker than I anticipated. He has had to mature also.”

That’s a big load for anyone to bear.

“You learn to shut down your frustrations,” Faulkner said. “You can’t take your frustrations at home out on the kids here. You learn how to resolve your problems at the place they arose. It’s all about balancing. It’s something you need to know in life, how to act, how not to take out your frustrations on an innocent person.”

RON BENTON discovered a passion for literature his junior year of high school in Alyson Dorr’s classroom. His senior year, that passion grew in Michael Christensen’s classroom.

“During senior year I was originally going to go with music (at Montana University),” Benton said, who plays drums. “For whatever reason, I decided that band wasn’t what I wanted to do.”

A love of literature struck abruptly, and Benton sheepishly admits that his transcripts from freshman and sophomore year prove that he hadn’t found an interest in the subject yet.

In Dorr’s class, Benton enjoyed The Great Gatsby and A River Runs Through It. He was introduced to mythology and fell in love. He liked the Odyssey. His favorite, far and away, is the King Arthur legend.

Benton admits he took Christensen’s class because of the teacher’s reputation for difficulty.

In his freshman year at Flathead Valley Community College, Benton took an introduction to education class and happened to observe Christensen’s class. Suddenly, he was hooked. Benton switched his major from English literature to English education. He continued in that after transferring to UM.

Right now, Benton’s greatest enjoyment in his student teaching is his first period creative writing class.

“I get to watch the creation of ideas,” Benton said. “(My students) all have a wonderful voice. They have an opportunity to development their voice, something they don’t get in other classes.”

Benton’s greatest student-teaching challenge has been self-imposed, he said. He struggles to find his own style of teaching.

“I’ve been in many classes and paid attention to many teachers,” he said. “It’s easy to want to be like them. You start pretending they’re in the room.”

After a full day of teaching, Benton doesn’t stop there. He heads to the Columbia Falls Boys & Girls Club until about 6 p.m. five days a week. In high school, he served as athletic director and he’s filling a similar capacity now.

After graduation, Benton hopes to teach in Wyoming.

“I love to fish, hike and camp and that’s all I need,” he said.

But for now, he’s just having fun.