Mickens retiring after 43 years of teaching

By Daphne Jackson

Corvallis Primary School teacher Carolyn Mickens is retiring after 43 years as an educator.

Mickens said her interest in teaching started when she was young.

“When I was in third grade, I liked having to do the paperwork,” she said. “And then, when I was in junior high, our next door neighbor was a first grade teacher, and I got to go grade papers with her. I thought that was pretty awesome, so I always looked forward to going.”

Mickens said she started her teaching career with one year floating between first grade classrooms in Stevensville, helping struggling students individually.

The other 42 years of Mickens’ teaching career have all been spent at Corvallis Primary. She said she spent one year teaching the second grade before deciding to focus on third grade.

“Third grade is when they start grasping the concepts,” she said. “And by third grade, if the kid isn’t able to read, I’ve found an awesome phonics program in years gone by… and it uses pictures, and they look at the pictures and the letters, and all of a sudden, these kids that have never been able to read have jumped up two and a half years. Which is incredible, they’re only supposed to jump a year. So I’ve had a lot of success. I love third grade, because I’m able to reach out and fill in the gaps, and let them go forward.”

Mickens said she teaches all subjects except music and PE, for which she said the school has separate teachers. In addition to traditional classes such as math and social studies, Mickens said she also teaches art in her classroom.

“I try to make the art fit into the social studies and math, so they have fun stuff with the art stuff, to make it more learnable,” she said. “I try to be creative.”

She said although many things have changed over her career, she has seen concepts come back in different forms over time.

“It’s kind of like a carousel ride, because when I first started teaching in math, it was called ‘modern math,’ and then in ten years it changed to ‘new math’ and now the same thing is called ‘math expressions’,” she said. “The other thing is, we started out with everybody having to be taught as a whole group, and then they were individualized, then we had to go back to the whole group, now they’re individualizing. So they’ve realized that kids need to be met at their level to bring them up.”

Overall, Mickens estimates that she has had about 900 students. This year, Mickens had a class of 22 students, one of four classes for the school’s 80+ third-grade students. She said it is challenging to balance the needs of individual students with the need to keep class flowing smoothly.

“The challenges are the severely emotionally-disturbed children that you have fulltime in the classroom,” Mickens said. “And trying to teach and manage them at the same time is quite a challenge. To meet their needs, know how to reach out to each child and the child’s personality, to find out what works for them and what doesn’t work for them. Not being able to discipline anymore, you have to find ways of getting a child to do the right thing, and understand that doing the right thing is better than breaking the rules, but you can’t do anything. You can’t set them in the corner, because that’s singling them out. So, we’re not really in the corner, we’re just by the teacher for help.”

She said one aspect of teaching that has changed a lot over time is family dynamics. She said many parents don’t help their children with homework nearly as much as they used to, and added that she feels many children are overscheduled with extracurricular activities.

“I personally don’t send homework home, except that they have to read 20 minutes a night, and study spelling words, but other than that I don’t, because I know it’s not going to help,” she said. “Other than irritate parents and kids get frustrated because ‘I didn’t bring it back, it’s not done.’ I don’t want them to be upset. I have the lower-income kids in here, so that’s a challenge, because if parents aren’t willing to help their kids at home, then you have a lot on your shoulders to reinforce here. So you have to learn that you want to make their day the best day possible, and let go. When they go home, you can’t worry about it.”

Despite the challenges and worries for some of her students, Mickens said she thinks teaching is a worthwhile undertaking.

“And the pay isn’t that great, but I think the rewards are when you see the kids grow, and they blossom, or you see that little light go on, and they go ‘oh, that’s how you do it’,” she said. “And it’s just like ‘yes!’ you’ve succeeded to break through and reach them. I had a boy that was told that he couldn’t ever read, and he started reading in third grade. He’s now 25, and we went to a wedding last summer, and he said as he introduced me to all these people, I don’t even know who they are, ‘this is the lady that taught me to read when they said I could never learn to read.’ And I thought, ‘wow, you’re in your 20’s, and still, that was something meaningful for him,’ so that’s the pay.”

Over the years, Mickens said she has learned many small tricks to try to help make her students’ days as pleasant and productive as possible. For example, blue screens from a teacher’s magazine cover the industrial lights and reduce the brightness, which helps keep students more calm. She said many of her techniques are not things she could pass on easily, as a large portion is based on innate instincts.

Mickens said since she has been at the same school for so long, she has taught multiple generations within families.

“Having taught for so long, I’ve taught the kids of my kids, the kids of my students,” she said. “It’s fun. They come back, and you reminisce, and they think about when they were in third grade and had you for third grade, and then their kids strut around going ‘well, my dad or my mom had Ms. Mickens.’”

Mickens said after her retirement, she intends to take time to have a garden, sort through some things in a house she intends to sell, and travel to visit some friends and relatives around the US.

She said she is a fourth-generation Stevensville resident, and selling her house will involve sorting belongings from her great-grandfather down.

“That’s why it’s taken me forever to do the house, because, we have an old apple house out back that used to be from the late 1800’s, so I have Great-Grandpa’s stuff in there, his newspaper clippings and pictures, and just tons of stuff of Grandpa’s,” she said. “You start with, fill this box, and you come back a week later, and you’re going, ‘is this what I was going to throw away, or is this what I was going to save?’ and then you go through it again, so I’ll just wait until my retirement, and then go down and do it the right way. I found some pictures that had the Catholic church, St. Mary’s, and they had artifacts, pieces they had found but didn’t know what it was. Those old photos, they found some of those pictures so they could see what those artifacts went to, so that was pretty cool. And if I had just gone through and started throwing, they would never have been able to find that out. That must be the teacher in me.”