Amy Vinyard is a preschool teacher who is able to channel her strong work ethic and energetic personality to educate young minds. She takes her responsibility seriously and both inspires her students and gets inspired by them.
Video Transcription:
My name is Amy Vinyard . I'm a preschool teacher, and I do what I love.
Every day my job is different. It includes a lot of the same types of thing, but kids keep you on your toes all the time. I would say that the main focus of my job is to teach kids how to become independent and learn how to become members of society at such a young age and just prepare them to have the skills and social skills and knowledge that they will need to move on into school and beyond.
What I love is seeing their faces when they learn something new or have success. It is so exciting to see when they've been working and working on something and they finally get it..and just to see their enthusiasm for life - it reminds me of things that I am ...of what my focus should be. You know, just little things can make them happy each day and it shouldn't take a huge moment to make me so happy, but it could be something small. Whether it be a success with learning a new reading skill or something that they've practiced when they've had an encounter with a friend that they didn't like. So instead of crying about it we have learned a new skill to talk about it and just that they learn things and they can put them into action, and it's just really exciting to see them take off with those new things.
Parents weren't actually a huge influence on my teaching decision. My father is now, but my mom tried to encourage me in the opposite direction just because teaching is a field that requires a lot of work and a lot of patience and not the greatest payout, but it's not always about the payout. It's not about monetary payout, but what you're investing it into the future and so when I went into college, I wasn't quite sure that I wanted to do teaching just because my family was kind of discouraging me even though I knew that's where my passion was. So I tried a different major - I tried broadcast journalism for a semester and realized I really want to teach and so I just stuck with my gut.
So one thing I definitely value is hard work. I'm a busy person and I like to work and I like to try new things, and teaching is a field where you can constantly change what you're doing to make it better. You see kids that you're trying to teach them something and it's not working and so you go back and "okay, how can I make this better or more effective? how can I present it in a way that they're going to be excited and that they're going to get it?" So being able to change things a lot..I'm very energetic and enthusiastic and when you're trying to captivate a young audience that's pretty necessary, so that's a personality trait that I'd say has helped me to be an effective teacher.
What I like about preschool and elementary school as opposed to older education is just the kids come in so fresh. They're very moldable. I know how much of an influence my teachers had on me, and I wanted to be that positive influence in their lives. They look up to you so much and modeling is just so effective. They will mimic the things that you do and so part of that can make your job a little scary because I don't necessarily want them to copy everything that I do because we all make mistakes. With the younger kids, they're just very excited about life and very excited about learning, and I love being able to give them those foundations to everything else that we do. They don't necessarily know what their passions are yet. When you ask a child what they want to be when they grow up, they'll go on and list a hundred things, you know, whether it be an ice cream maker to as far as an astronaut to a pizza man to...they just...everything in life is exciting to them, so just laying the foundation so that they can continue to build on that is just very exciting, There's several things that we need to be able to do in society - we need to be able to read; we need to be able to count; we need to know how to interact with others; we need to learn how to speak - and those are all thing that you can work on in the preschool level.
I've always been a leader. I've always been the center of attention - I was the baby of my family and so I just kind of did everything that I could to grab the attention and grab and audience. I've always been in performance as far as music, dance, gymnastics - whenever I could be in the spotlight. I enjoyed writing plays in elementary school and then we had drama club and we acted those out, so anything that people would have their eyes on me, so I'm a teacher and I have eight pairs of eyes on me everyday, so that's awesome to me! In elementary school is when I started - I always wanted to babysit my baby cousins that I knew I had an interest in children...thought it was just for fun and then as I got older, realized that was going to lead to my future.
My name in Amy Vinyard. I'm a preschool teacher and I really do what I love.