Katie Henry

Class of 2010

Hometown: Middletown, Ohio
Current Job: 4th grade teacher, Brookville, Ohio

Practice makes perfect

I've wanted to teach forever. When I was younger I would bring my school papers home from school, erase my answers, and give them to my little sister. Still, I've learned that you can't really know what it means to teach until you walk into your classroom and you are the teacher.

I was very lucky to get my current position; there were 500 other applicants. I think it helped that I had worked with several professors on research and grants outside of my regular classroom work and that I had seven years of work experience. I worked full-time at a retirement home while I was at Miami.

Her "aha" moment

When I started on the Miami Middletown campus, I had to read a book for one of my English classes called "Our America: Life and Death on the Southside of Chicago" by LeAlan Jones and Lloyd Newman. A reporter gave Jones and Newman, two 13-year-old boys a tape recorder and told them to interview their neighbors and family.

Reading that book was an "aha" moment for me. I realized there are a lot of people with needs in America and you can't always pull yourself up by your bootstraps. I have a photo of Jones and Newman hanging up in my classroom, and this year, I received a grant to buy digital recorders for my students so they can go out into their communities and record their lives.

On teaching and relationships

I always enjoyed close relationships with my Miami professors. As an undergrad, I worked on several research projects. One combined early childhood education with the elderly. I had young children meet with seniors and write stories about their lives. They then narrated and recorded their stories onto DVDs.

The other project taught young children about where their food comes from. I helped develop a curriculum—it included reading stories like "The Little Red Hen Makes a Pizza" and using a grain grinder to make bread in the classroom—that met the Ohio State Standards in science and language arts.

My relationships with my professors have continued since I left school. I've been meeting with one of my education professors regularly along with another recent education graduate. We’ve been reading and discussing the book "Education and Ecstasy" by George Leonard. We talk about the reality of teaching, how you come in with hopes for your students, and then you adapt to their needs and how you also have to include the expectations of parents, administrators, and the school board. It's been a pivotal time for me as I navigate the waters of my first- and second-year teaching experiences.

One of the most important things I learned at Miami is that teaching is about more than standardized testing. It's about the relationships we build. Great thinkers, writers, artists, inventors and scientists sometimes will tell you that they barely survived school, except for the one or two teachers who really made an impression on them, and changed the course of their lives. I want to be that person for my students.