For Educator Awareness Month, we're highlighting one educator every week to show the great job they're doing in our schools.
This week we're introducing Ashlee Shaw, a fifth grade teacher at Mamie Towles Elementary.
In light of the month, Shaw says this is a time where she reflects on her colleagues, her own teachers throughout her life, and her mother, who was also a teacher and a person she gained a lot of inspiration from in her own career.
"She started off her teaching career at Mamie Towles, and this is my first year here too, so it's truly a full circle moment,"Â said Shaw.
There are a monumental number of challenges when it comes to teaching, but she says the hardest challenge she faces is time.
"To balance everything, enough time to do all the ideas to teach them to try to reach each kiddo, but even the time that I'm spending outside of the classroom and trying to find that balance of my own home life and being a mom and a wife versus just a teacher," she said.
But Shaw says being a mother and a teacher complement each other, and it helps her stay well equipped to provide anything her large class of students may need.
"How do you fit all those needs in one school day and the time as far as giving them timely feedback on their writing? she said. "And when you're grading 30 writing assignments, it takes a long time, and worrying that I'm not giving a kid enough time."
Shaw adds, "There are 30 of them; it can become a challenge."
This is her 13th year of teaching, 11 of which have been spent teaching fifth grade, and two of those years were spent teaching fourth grade.
Aside from teaching her younger students, she also teaches aspiring educators what the job is all about.
"We just had a practicum student from UNR for one of their classes come in, and she just finished last week with us, so I've done some ARL interns as well, and it's crazy, you know, the amount of time they get is even shorter," she said.
Right now, in Shaw's current fifth-grade classroom, they're diving deep into their reading. Shaw says even the non-readers are hooked by the captivating literature.
She also mentions that even though she may be teaching the kids a lot of material throughout the year, she learns a lot from her students as well.
"Oh, I learn from the students constantly, and there are even moments in math where they have a way of a new strategy, and I'm like… I never thought of it that way," she said.
As for more ways students and parents can appreciate teachers, Shaw says it's all about support.
"The biggest factor is if you have a good support system," she said. "This job becomes a little bit more manageable."
She adds, "And that has really gotten me through some really tough times, and I don't want to leave because I have such a support system and everything."
"The kids will just let us know, or, like, they randomly just are thinking of us, or they're like, Oh, here's a card, here's a note, here's my class getting me tiny little ducks because they know I have rubber ducks in the classroom, but it just comes down to that support," she says.
