As the bell rings and the students settle in for the year, Caroline Walsh is prepared and excited for another year of teaching fifth grade language arts and social studies at Bridgeport Elementary. Walsh began her teaching career only a year ago, after she finished college at Taylor University in Indiana. A Mason native, Hamilton drew her in with its diversity and small city charm.
More than Hamilton, Walsh fell in love with teaching fifth grade students.
“It’s just the right age where I feel like they are starting to form opinions,” said Caroline.
These new opinion-making skills are something Walsh likes to put to use in the classroom to help relate things that may seem far away to things that the children may already be dealing with, and not realize.
“We can read books that get on these topics that are kind of tricky to talk about,” said Walsh. “They’re moldable, so they’re willing to form opinions about things they haven’t yet thought about.”
Caroline likes to pick books for her class that help put her students in another’s shoes to see what it would be like, and how it should change their lives today.
“Empathy is a big buzzword in my classroom,” said Caroline.
Teaching fifth grade comes with a unique set of challenges, including the expectations placed on the teachers by the students themselves.
“With younger grades, trust builds quickly, but with the older grades, it takes time for them to trust you,” she said. “In first grade, it might be that you’re an instant rock star, but in fifth grade, you have to prove it.”
This can be difficult sometimes, as the students get older, because their focuses shift and they are more aware of those around them.
“When you’re in younger grades, you’re trying to please your teacher, but in the older grades, you’re more trying to please your friends,” said Caroline.
The influence of peers can sometimes be problematic, so Walsh prefers to get out ahead of it by implementing conferences with each of her students.
She sits down with each student in the beginning of the school year and has a short conversation focused solely on that student. This allows not only for Caroline to get to know that student better, but also for the student to get to know her and open that door to allow trust to build.
“With the older grades, privacy and that mutual respect are so huge,” said Walsh. “They need to feel like you respect them for them to respect you.”
Walsh’s focus turned to teaching when she was in high school. She had been tutoring a sixth grade student, and it was suggested to her that she was really good at it. Although she was unsure of it, she decided to give it a try, and the more she got into it, the more she realized that was exactly where she was meant to be.
“I started feeling like I was wired for it and could do a lot of good in the world through that,” said Caroline. “I teach because I love having a role in these lives to teach kids that they matter, but so does everyone else.”
Walsh works hard to include parental communication in her teaching style. She makes it a point to reach out to each students’ parents to establish a relationship with them as well because she knows that nobody knows that student better.
“The students where I saw the most growth were the ones whose parents I’d talked to the most,” she said.
She also sends newsletters home with the students to let them know what’s been going on in class. She finds that this is a good way to connect home and school.
A hard part of teaching can be having to correct a student while still maintaining that trust and respect for one another.
“There are days where I think some of them think I don’t like them if I have to correct them and that’s not the case,” said Caroline.
She works daily to make sure her students know that making a mistake is not the end of the world, and the reset button is always an option.
Ms. Walsh is looking forward to another year at Bridgeport Elementary with a great group of students.