From Ontario to Georgia: A Lifelong Passion for Teaching

For Donna Anderson, teaching is not just something she does; it is her true passion for more than 30 years.

Anderson, a kindergarten teacher who is originally from Hamilton, Ontario, won the Teacher of the Year award for 2010-11 at .

She said being the Teacher of the Year not only has been a great honor, but also has been an emotional experience for her.

"It's amazing. I cried, I did," Anderson said. "I've been teaching for a really, really long time, and we find that kindergarten teachers are rarely even nominated. This means so much. I feel so grateful."

Anderson started teaching in Canada at the age of 19. She moved to Georgia with her husband, who started a water treatment company. Pitner Elementary is something dear to her heart because she has been there since the day the school opened its doors eight years ago.

"I believe in child-centered education instead of teacher-centered education," she said. "That was the reason I chose Cobb County instead of the others."

Anderson has always been a reading specialist and taught science as well as social sciences at the middle school level, but she loves working with little children and helping them become self-motivated learners.

"I guess we're more like motivators than teachers at a time when academics are being pushed down," Anderson said. "I always felt I'm a facilitator. I try to present what you need to do and encourage you to do it, so that you want to, not me."

She said the best moment on her job is seeing the light go on when the children finally understand.

"I like to appeal to their better selves," she said. "If you start them right and teach them to enjoy what they are doing and simply be a better person, it seems to last for a long time. It never goes away."

Working with little children isn't easy. To be a successful motivator for her pupils, Anderson said, she often has to remind herself to look at every day as a fresh start.

"Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, there are children who would continue to reject everything you do," she said. "The challenge is finding the hook, finding the thing that will motivate them, and at the same time, knowing that tomorrow is a new day and everything will be OK."

Anderson said it is important for teachers to have the "new day" approach with themselves so that hard times don't turn them into grouches and make them rough on children.

"You always give them another chance," she said. "I think I have an empathy for my students because I didn't get to go to a kindergarten and had a very poor experience in elementary school."

Anderson's background in teaching middle school science has led her to an unusual fact-based education approach in her kindergarten classroom. She said not many others teach their students the correct adult vocabulary as she does, but she believes in the value of introducing little kids to a more sophisticated vocabulary.

"For example, I let them know that 'a, b, c, d' is called an alphabetical order, and 'minuses, pluses, equals' is a math equation," she said. "This way they don't have to be taught twice when they grow up."

Anderson also cares about the quality and the state of education.

"I try to be someone who's always trying to energize, refresh, redo and keep up with what's current," she said.

Asked whether she has received any unexpected perks as Pitner's Teacher of the Year, she said: "No perks, except that I had to write a very long, reflective paper and send it to the county. I don't do reflective papers often, and that really had me thinking hard."