Rachel Farmer

My name is Rachel Farmer. I started teaching right out of college. My teaching career began by teaching adults how to speak English. I spent six years teaching adults English as a second language. Three of those years were spent in Indonesia, and the last three were spent in Fort Worth working for a refugee placement agency. However, in all those years of teaching adults I still loved and longed to work with children. Teaching English contributed in a large way to me becoming a better Early Childhood Education teacher. It taught me patience, how to work with pictures to explain things, and it opened my eyes to the importance of teaching children how to read. During these years of teaching ESL, I was a language learner myself. Being a student learning how to speak, read, and write a new language was as valuable to my future career in elementary education, as being an English teacher.

In college I was called to teach in Early Childhood Education. However, the road to the first grade classroom was a little more varied and longer than I had imagined. After teaching adults for six years, in the area of English as a second language, I found myself in Oklahoma City. Here the door was opened for me to finally find myself in an elementary classroom. I have been at Arthur Elementary School for the past six years, and I have been in a first grade classroom each year. I have fallen in love with teaching first grade. My favorite subject to teach is ELA, and I love being able to give these kiddos an educational foundation for the rest of their lives. Teaching in OKC has also been a great fit for my previous experience in ESL, as most of my students come from two language families. Teaching in the elementary classroom certainly has its challenges, but it also has great rewards. Oklahoma City has given me the opportunity to grow as a teacher and fulfill the calling given to me in college. I will be forever grateful to OKCPS for allowing me to be the teacher I didn't even know I could be.