At home in her skin, fearless to be who she is, first-year teacher Lindsey Hammond can’t wait for Sept. 7 and the opening bell so she can kick it with the kids in the class.
Can’t wait to share with those young minds her passion for learning and a voracious appetite for reading that embraces everything from dystopian novels like “Hunger Games” and young adult literature like J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series to Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” and much more.
“I’m a self-proclaimed nerd, I’ll admit it,” Hammond said with a laugh.
After all, who but a nerd would reach all the way back to Battlestar Galactica to pluck a name for her frog, “Fat Apollo,” or name her fish, Sir Baltasar?”One of the first things I told my family after I got the teaching job was, ‘Yay, now I can afford to go to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter! That’ll be my spring break!” Hammond said.
Boiling over with ideas, bright and chipper, the 23-year-old Mt. Baker Middle School language arts teacher is one of the new faces in the Auburn School District this year.
Being here is a homecoming for the 2006 Auburn Riverside High School graduate.
“I love that I’m back,” Hammond said during a break from her preparations for school.
This job is the realization of a dream nearly as old as its dreamer.
“Gosh, I have wanted to be a teacher forever,” Hammond said. “I can remember in the third grade the day my mother sent me to school with money for a book fair to buy books, and I came home with a teacher play kit that they had at this book fair. It had gold stars and little work sheets, and I forced everyone to play with me. I forced my little brother and friends to attend school, even my mother if I could talk her into it. Otherwise, I just taught the stuff to animals and dolls. I did like to read to them. My favorite time was story time.”
After high school graduation, Hammond, one of four children, attended the University of Idaho, where she earned her English degree and took part in the teacher prep program. She graduated in December of 2010. She did her student teaching at North Tapps Middle School last fall with Erica Sage, her favorite high school teacher and a major influence.
She learned she had the Mt. Baker job just two weeks ago.
As a new teacher, Hammond won’t have her own room, she’ll be pushing her cart from place to place. But that’s OK, she said, teacher’s got to pay her dues. She will have an office.
Sage, now a teacher at Lake Tapps Middle School, is her role model.
“She inspired me to be a teacher and be like her in every way, shape and form,” said Hammond. “She’s been my mentor all the time. It was amazing to go back and do my student teaching with her. Our personalities match up. She’s a year older, but we are really good friends.”… It was her enthusiasm, the fact that she was a teacher who was completely herself. She’d change her voice, she’d jump, she’d yell, she’d scream. And she was always so excited about everything. I wanted to read every book she told me to read. We would all race to class to be in her honors language arts class. It was not a typical class where you sat a desk, listening to lectures. We studied for her tests by playing “Jeopardy,” and we would move our desks around and have formal debates about characters and their moral decisions. We got up and moved and were involved. I loved that.”
One word of warning for kids lucky enough to get Ms. Hammond: characters in the books she loves to read aloud and bring to life with vocal characterizations have been known to clamber off the pages and shake hands — or paws — with students.
