Liz Wehmeyer, an award-winning second grade teacher at Altruria Elementary School, comes from a long line of educators. Growing up, she was surrounded by family members who were in the education field, like her grandfather and aunt, who were superintendents, and her grandmother and cousins, who were teachers.
“It was something I was always around, and I knew at a very young age that’s what I wanted to do,” says Wehmeyer. “My parents joke that I was in second grade when I announced to the world that’s what I was going to do.”
Wehmeyer attended high school in Buffalo, New York, and during her senior year, her family moved to Memphis. However, she decided to finish her high school education in New York. Then, when it came time to search for colleges, she looked at schools in Pennsylvania, but her heart took her to the South to be close to her family, and she ended up at Ole Miss to get her elementary education degree.
“I officially moved to Memphis when I got my first teaching job, and I never left,” Wehmeyer says. She spent her first four years educating fifth graders at Barret’s Chapel School and at Highland Oaks Elementary School. After that, she found her home at Altruria Elementary School, where she’s taught second grade for 15 years.
“It’s just like a big family,” she says. “I’ve been lucky enough to teach so many siblings. And we just kind of know everybody. There are over 800 kids, but it still feels like a small school. You know all the kids, and the kids know you. And we have a very supportive administration and coworkers. It’s a great place to be.”
Wehmeyer, who’s always had passions for art and computers, has incorporated these interests into her teaching.
“I really like to do hands-on and creative activities and to incorporate technology,” she says. “School is hard, and the standards have gotten really tough and rigorous. So anything to get them excited to come in. And just letting them share and talk and show what they’ve created at the end of it is always really big, instead of them just staying at their desks all day.”
Wehmeyer has won a number of accolades, including The David A. Pickler Distinguished Technology Educator Award, The Bartlett City Schools Innovation in Teaching with Technology Award, and two schoolwide technology awards, for her exemplary coding projects with her students.
One project involved students animating their names through Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s coding program (Scratch) and sharing their works with other members on the platform.
“They were able to get critiques from other members of Scratch, and they learned about coding and got to interact with kids from around the world and get feedback from someone other than me,” says Wehmeyer. “It was really neat because then you can really extend the learning when they go back and add to it after some critique, or it sparks another idea.”
Wehmeyer says it’s important for students to learn these computer science and technology skills from an early age. “I think it prepares them for their future,” she says. “Technology is everywhere. Every business, every store, and every doctor’s office has computers, technologies, websites, and apps. And coding is its own language. So I think, just like learning a foreign language, the earlier we expose them to it, the more they are able to deal with it and be familiar with it.”
Wehmeyer says the most important virtue she’s learned from teaching is to have grace.
“It’s so easy when you’re in college or when you’re a brand-new teacher to have high expectations,” she says. “But you also have to understand that they’re kids, and they’re 7 and 8, and they’re going to make mistakes — and I’m going to make mistakes. And that’s how you rebound and recover from them. And as long as you’re putting in the effort and really trying, that’s just as important as a perfect score on a paper.”
Wehmeyer says she loves teaching because it keeps her on her toes each and every day.
“Every day is an adventure,” she says. “You never know what you’re really going to walk into because no day is the same.”
Most of all, Wehmeyer is appreciative of the bonds and connections she has made with her students.
“I’m able to keep up with them because I live out here, too,” she says. “So I can see what they’re doing all the way through high school, and there are some college kids I check in on. It’s nice. Once they’re my kids, they’re always my kids.”
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