Arlithia Mackey, a 6th-grade English language arts teacher at Veritas College Preparatory Charter School, has taken a lot from her positive educational experience growing up and has applied this knowledge to her teaching career.
Mackey was born in the Bahamas, but her mother wanted to provide her and her sister the best educational opportunities she could, so she moved them to Florida. “My mother was very dedicated and would wake up at 5 a.m. every day to drive us to school 55 minutes away from where we lived,” says Mackey. “She wanted us to have a great education, and that kind of followed me for the rest of my life.”
When Mackey was in 7th grade, she had an opportunity to visit the University of Florida. “I fell in love with the campus, and I promised myself that was the school I was going to go to,” she says.
The Florida Opportunities Scholars Program awarded Mackey a scholarship for first-generation college students so she could attend the University of Florida, where she majored in family, youth, and community sciences. While there, she got an opportunity to teach 7th-grade literature for Breakthrough Collaborative, a nonprofit organization dedicated to effecting positive change in urban schools. “I tried teaching that first time, and I fell in love with it,” she says. “I taught the class again, and then I decided to minor in education.”
Once she graduated, Mackey began to look into charter school education and reform. “I had seen that Memphis had a lot going on with that,” she says. So she applied for the Teach for America program in Memphis, and she was placed at Veritas in 2015. “I absolutely love teaching here,” she says. “It’s been the joy of my life.”
Mackey says that having a degree in family and community sciences has helped her tremendously with her teaching career. “I have applied much of what I learned in college to teaching,” she says. “I got the opportunity to understand the psychology of adolescent development and to understand from an outside perspective.”
Mackey aims to connect with each of her students so she can facilitate a positive and effective learning environment for them. “By the end of the first couple of weeks of school, I make it a priority to know how to pronounce students’ first and last names, connect with their families, understand their life stories and who they are as people,” she says. “Those things are essential for me. And when I get in the classroom, I’m able to lean on that knowledge to help each individual student learn.”
Mackey wants lessons to be interesting for her students. “I’m a hands-on learner, and I’m also a hands-on instructor. I believe in teaching by doing. So when it comes time to explain something, I find an interactive way to introduce it,” she says, adding, “I also think that it’s really important for middle schoolers to understand the relevance of what they’re learning. Even when I’m talking about concepts, it’s really important for me to connect it to the bigger picture, whether it be college, career, or something relevant to what’s happening in the world around them.”
Mackey and her students have a quid pro quo relationship. “As a teacher, I teach my kids to believe in the greatest thing that they can imagine and go after it. I learned that in showing my students how to succeed, I can do the same for myself,” she says. “They have the greatest imaginations, and they inspire me. They have dreams for me that I haven’t even considered, like writing a book.”
Mackey received her master’s degree in secondary educational studies last May from Johns Hopkins University, and now, she is considering pursuing a doctorate in either sociology or curriculum and instruction. “My end goal, if I go that route, would be to work in universities and teacher preparation programs to prepare pre-service teachers for working in urban school districts,” she says. “I think it’s important for teachers to understand the conditions around students and what’s going on with them on a psychological and societal level before they enter the classroom.”
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