Schools

VIDEOS: A Teacher Montville Will Remember

Heather Holmes - and her second-grade partners - makes a difference in kids' lives

Heather Holmes is the teacher you want your kids to have.

She’s a sprite, with a huge smile and a positive attitude. She’s a taskmaster, thoroughly determined to teach your children, and teach them to excel. She understands the kids, knowing, for instance, that a promise of 10 minutes of Legos will elicit a spate of excellent behavior.

And she’s Montville’s Teacher of the Year.

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HOLMES WAS IN THIRD GRADE when she told her mother – also a teacher, also a Teacher of the Year – that she was going to be a teacher.

Find out what's happening in Montvillewith free, real-time updates from Patch.

She was 16 when she taught her first class. It was at a camp, and she says, “I remember it like it was yesterday.”

Anyone can learn to be a teacher, she says. “To love it, it has to be in you.”

Part of loving it is understanding the kids, understanding the world they are in.  The promise of Legos is part of that understanding.

“We don’t give them choices,” she says, speaking of her second-graders. “They have to have choices.”

The kids live in an often-overscheduled, often overstructured world, Holmes says, where they have to do this, and they have to do that.

If you give them the choice, “they work like dogs.”

 

HOLMES TEACHES SECOND GRADE at the Dr. Charles E. Murphy Elementary School. She is 41, and started teaching in 1993. Most of her career has been spent in Montville; she has taught a variety of grade levels, and really loves second grade. The kids are old enough to have some independence, and young enough to be hugged and cuddled.

Times have changed in all the grades, Holmes says, over the years. Second graders have homework now, Monday through Thursday. They are generally doing the work that third-graders used to do.

“The standards are getting harder and harder,” she says. More is expected of them now than was expected when we were in school, she says, and in fact, more is expected than was expected even of the older kids in the family.

Generally, life is busier for everyone – and that includes her. She and her husband have two children, one in fifth grade and the other in first.

“I get that every night is busy,” she says. “I’m in the same boat.”

 

HERE'S SOME OF THE COOL STUFF  her second-graders do:

  • They make poetry books that they keep throughout the year. They write the poems, and make the art.
  • At the end of the year, they have a poets’ breakfast at the school, where they invite whomever they want, and read two poems.
  • They collaborate on a book that Holmes puts together each year for the class. Each pupil gets a page or two, with writing and drawing.
  • Even in regular classes, they have fun, recently going out into the hall to leap and jump from example to example, while focusing on the learning.

“This is what they are going to remember in 20 or 40 years from now,” Holmes says.

 

In her own words:

“Teacher of the Year is a humbling, overwhelming honor. These aren’t the things you hear. We try to praise (the pupils) 10 times for every time we give them constructive criticism. Adults need that, too.”

 

“I can’t do what I do without my partners.”

 

“Sometimes you get mommy guilt. I have 19 kids here that need me, and I signed a contract.  I know there are people who call in (sick when something happens at home), but I can’t do that.”

 

“I do not profess to be perfect. I profess to love your child and work really hard.”


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