(WGHP) — What has a greater or broader effect on our society than our public education system?
That’s part of what draws people like Kayla Ranew to being a teacher.
She graduated from UNC-Greensboro, which a school with a long and well-earned reputation for producing quality educators, and began teaching almost immediately at High Point Central High School where she’s taught psychology from her first year. When we visited, she had the full attention of her AP Psychology class.
“My degree is in history. Psychology was never part of the plan,” Ranew said. “I’ve loved history for a long time. I had great history teachers in high school, and that’s what I focused on … When I student taught, my onsite teacher educator taught psychology as an elective … When I got hired here, they were like, ‘Great! We need another psychology teacher,’ and here we are. Thirteen years later, and I’ve taught it every semester.”
But teaching today isn’t what it was a generation or two ago. Often teachers are asked not just to be educators but to be confidants much as a parent would be.
“I think in elementary school, it would be a little more true. In high school, maybe not as much,” Ranew said. “Sometimes we get kids who come in … They want food. They had trouble at home or with their friends, and they need someone to talk to, so you definitely get a little bit of that … Sometimes, it can be very heavy.”
That is one of the hard parts of the profession for Ranew. Unlike many others, it can be hard to leave issues behind when you leave school when you know a kid is going through tough times. It makes you wonder if it helps or hurts that her husband is a teacher, too.
“Both … There are definitely times where … something I’m frustrated with, and he absolutely understands, and I can take that moment to unload … There are other times … where we both know how to turn it off,” Ranew said.
High Point Central Principal Mike Hettenbach says dealing with that kind of burden for years is one of the difficult things about the teaching profession for some.
“With veteran teachers … is the lack of support for public education not just in this state but in this country,” Hettenbach said. “People don’t really understand the grind for teachers.”
See more of Ranew’s journey as an educator in this edition of The Buckley Report.
