Mansfield finding her way at WF
What a teacher is, is more important than what they teach.
Here she is! Mrs. Malinda Mansfield is a new English teacher at WF. She moved here from Indiana where her husband still is (he will be joining her soon). She has been married for 13 years and has a daughter who lives in North Carolina.
Mansfield has been living in Florence for less than a month. She came to WF because Mr. Dowdell saw her application and resume online and asked her to consider an interview. Long story short, they offered her the job right away and, voila: she moved to SC!.
After a few weeks teaching at WF, Mansfield thinks that the teachers, the staff, and the community here are very good and supportive. She can tell that they care about the students’ education.
“The students are the best part of my day at West Florence. There are different duties and responsibilities, but the students are definitely what make me wake up and come to school in the morning,” she said.
She said she absolutely has no problem adjusting to the school system, especially handling her students in the class because her classroom management style is more about natural consequences. She won’t yell at students but she writes down their name if they are misbehaving or not doing any work in class. She will talk to the student’s parents if they have any problems in class but she would rather not to do that. She tries to treat her students as a young adults because they’re seniors and she thinks they should be responsible for their own education.
For each student at WF to figure out what success means, she hopes she can provide the resources and help that they need in order to succeed in their academic goals. She can engage a lot to what the students are facing, especially challenges like the SAT/ACT exam because she has been teaching for 12 years. She used to work at a college, volunteer in a reading classroom, and then became a substitute teacher. Most of her experiences are teaching at the college level.
Mansfield originally wanted to be a psychiatrist. But then she had her daughter and she was a single parent. She didn’t want to put her daughter in daycare so a good option was to become a teacher. Being a teacher is not easy but teaching has become something that she enjoys.
Finding her way around Florence was a challenge at first. Trying to get to WF one morning without using Google Maps, she ended up lost and stuck in construction traffic. She had to call administration to let them know that she would be a bit late and that’s when she gave up and used Google Maps. Adjusting to school may be easy but adjusting to living in a new environment is definitely a challenge!
Welcome, Mrs. Mansfield, to WF and to SC!
