Every teacher brings a private history into the classroom, much of it unknown to the children sitting at their desks.
Provost Elementary’s 3rd-grade teacher Rachel Chapman, for example, nearly went to law school.
Mrs. Chapman earned her teaching degree in 2000, then spent the next 25-some years raising a family. When her son reached third grade, she and her husband began talking about what might come next. Mrs. Chapman took the LSAT, applied to law schools, and received acceptances. She intended to pursue child advocacy.
She was preparing to go when her plans changed.
“I just had a really strong feeling that I needed to use my first degree instead,” Mrs. Chapman said.
She returned to education as a paraeducator for two years before moving into the classroom. She taught first grade for a year, and she is now in her second year teaching third grade at Provost Elementary.
The reason she was drawn to child advocacy followed her there.
“With the path of child advocacy, I’m doing the same thing,” Mrs. Chapman said. “I’m advocating for my students all the time.”
A teacher spends enough hours with a child to become, in Mrs. Chapman’s words, “an important second adult figure in their lives.” She thinks about what those hours can accomplish over a school year, especially for children who may already be deciding what they are capable of.
“It brings me a lot of joy to just see I’m helping these students move on to a better future and hopefully a love for education that will help them improve their life for whatever options they choose in the future.”
That core belief in her students sets the bar in her room. Although students arrive with different abilities and different experiences (and Mrs. Chapman readily acknowledges and celebrates their differences), she knows what all great teachers know: it is within our most challenged students to use their skills in survival and adaptation to become great. Mrs. Chapman knows that high love and high expectations potentiate that greatness.
“I believe every student can advance at an individual pace, guided by the distinct strengths and weaknesses they bring to their learning,” she said. “With the right support, they can make remarkable progress.”
She also believes students need to be asked to do difficult things. Mrs. Chapman recognizes that students require stability as a bedrock for growth.
“I work to create a safe classroom where my students feel successful and loved,” she said. “I’m a bit like a mother bear when it comes to my class.”
Mrs. Chapman wants students to feel protected enough to take risks and secure enough to work through challenges as they pursue their daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly goals. “I want them to feel safe and loved and feel like this is a place that they can be at peace and then go from there and learn,” she said.
“Any child can grow, but you have to have high expectations, and they will meet them.”
One of Mrs. Chapman’s favorite subjects to watch students build their skills is math. Mrs. Chapman says she likes its hands-on quality and how one idea can build naturally into the next.
More importantly, third-grade math presents some students with a way into the classroom while they develop their language skills. Reading English, for example, might be challenging for a child who is learning English or struggling with fluency. A math problem, on the other hand, offers that same child a shared, easily recognizable goal, particularly when phrased with manipulatives and visuals.
“If you think of maybe my students that are ML, math still resonates with them,” she said.
Phrased this way, math has an arguably innate, human element; where language might erect barriers between people, basic math and logic questions present formative challenges that everyone faces.
It's a problem Mrs. Chapman has had to grapple with seriously: teaching a refugee student who spoke Farsi. Many of the usual supports for English learners were difficult to use.
Many educators use a tablet with Google Translate so students can listen to or read directions in real time. But the translation tools Mrs. Chapman tried were not practical or available at the time for this student. Educators also often pair students with shared language and cultural backgrounds. But the mentioned student was the only Farsi speaker in her classroom.
So Mrs. Chapman had to find other ways to communicate, differentiate classroom products, provide visuals and manipulatives where possible, and locate new digital tools to help the student find their footing. The BYU language assistance program turned out to be a great resource. A BYU student who had learned Farsi while serving a mission for his church volunteered his time to help. It was challenging work, but Chapman's room is a space about overcoming and becoming. Teaching is, in our shared view, an essential career—one that uses content as a tool to scaffold lifelong growth and adaptability.
“It’s such a human job,” she said. “You see them come in; they’re discouraged, or they come from backgrounds where they aren’t supported or encouraged. As a teacher, you can become that person to encourage and support them.”
Competency in each given subject matters, of course. But what matters just as much to Mrs. Chapman is the change students find in themselves.
“You just see that light bulb go off and they’re like, ‘I am important, and I can do this,’” she said. “It’s worth it.”
More than two decades after earning her education degree, Mrs. Chapman finds herself accomplishing the work that once attracted her to child advocacy. The scale is perhaps more intimate: encapsulated in one school year; a room of youth discovering that challenges carried on heavy shoulders into the year will not follow them into the next year.
Looking back at the law-school path she almost took, Mrs. Chapman sounds settled about the choice.
“I’m glad I chose this one,” she said, “because I feel like I’m accomplishing more.”
Thank you, Rachel Chapman, for teaching our students how to live.
