By JAN McLAUGHLIN
BG Independent News
Inspired by her teachers as a child, Michelle Thomas would conduct her own classes at home – lining up her stuffed animals and reading aloud to them.
“There wasn’t an option for me,” she said of her future profession.
The benefactors of that destined career have been students at Crim Elementary School in Bowling Green. Thomas was recognized on Thursday by the BG Kiwanis Club as an outstanding educator, and shared her journey to finding the joy of teaching – every day.
Like others inspired by great educators, Thomas handily listed off the best teachers of her youth. The one who showed every child compassion. The one with endless patience. The one who encouraged her to write stories. And the one who would accept nothing less than her best.
In 2006, Thomas came to Bowling Green State University to learn how to become one of those teachers. She met her husband to be, and did her student teaching at Conneaut Elementary.
“I wanted Bowling Green to be my home,” she said.
But her road map took a detour at that point. Fresh out of college, she was raring to go – but there were no teaching jobs available in 2011. So she took a job as a banker – fully intending to return to her goal of becoming a teacher.
In 2012, she took a teaching job in Toledo, working with at-risk students. Then in 2018, she got the call she was waiting for – there was an opening at Crim Elementary School in Bowling Green.
“This was the place I was supposed to be,” she said.
Since then, she has been teaching fifth graders the joys of social studies, English and language arts.
Thomas teaches her students to avoid the trash and the tricks as they discover the treasure of learning. She shared the strategy with Kiwanis members, by giving them answers from the Jeopardy game show – the choices being phonology, morphology, biology and syntax. Using the process of elimination, she showed how students can weed out the trash and tricks to find the right answers. If an answer makes students raise their eyebrows to question it, then it’s probably not the right one.
“That’s the true joy of teaching,” she said. “I’m a word nerd, and I love teaching words.”
Thomas talked about the everyday pressures on educators – in the classroom, from legislation, and social media.
Despite the weighty challenges, Thomas said she finds joy in teaching, as her profession wades through changing laws, fluctuating class sizes, standardized testing, political pressures, school safety, levies, home/work balance, tech issues, social media, learning loss, social emotional issues, and staff shortages.
Thomas passed on a bit of wisdom she often shares with her fifth graders.
“You can’t stand in your own stink cloud and hope it will get better,” she said.
Thomas emphasizes to her students – and in her own life – the ability to choose joy.
“Each day, I wake up and choose joy,” she said. “Each day, I have the opportunity to change lives. This is the best job there is.”
Studies show, Thomas said, that students excel when their teachers are happy and confident. Or put another way, “your vibe attracts your tribe,” she said.
She stresses to students that they have control over their actions. “You can be mad – but you can’t be mean,” she often says to them.
One of the “treasures” Thomas unearths each school year is the 1BookBG program, which she has coordinated during the last three years with fellow teacher Stacey Higgins and Maria Simon, of the Wood County District Public Library.
The program brings Bowling Green elementary students together to read one author’s books as a community. 1BookBG gives each student a book of their own.
Every year, Thomas said she gets emotional, “listening to the little voices that say, ‘I get to keep this? This is really mine?’”
Thomas also talked about students performing community service in Bowling Green – such as raising money for the veterans banners in the city, making toys for the Wood County Humane Society, collecting stuffed animals for BG Fire Division to give to children during an emergency, and providing all the ingredients needed to make birthday cakes to the Brown Bag Food Project.
Students are doing more as part of the 25 Acts of Kindness program in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Bowling Green Schools Foundation – with projects like making cards for nursing home residents, and singing for groups.
Pure treasure in a world heavy with trash and tricks.
