My fifth grade writing teacher was a big reason why I discovered my love for writing and expressing myself through words. She would simply give me a piece of paper during class and tell me to write something, anything. This was so formative for me as a kid and it has even impacted my career choice. However, she will never know that those small acts changed the way I saw myself and my future.
Mandy Cates graduated from Union in 2001 and is now an education professor who has been teaching here for the last 5 years. She explained to me that her idea of what it means to be a good teacher comes from the impact her teachers had on her, so I proceeded to tell her the story of my fifth grade teacher.
Throughout our conversation, Cates continually circled back to the idea of “relationships” in teaching and how they are so important.
“That’s the influence we hope to have on students. It’s not that we’re gonna leave a legacy. It’s not that anybody’s necessarily gonna remember the academic content we taught. But it’s that we’re going to be speaking into their lives the way the Lord would have us to,” Cates explained.
As I began looking around her office during our conversation, I noticed the warmth that radiated not only from her decorations and her abundance of neatly organized, aesthetic office supplies, but also from the way she carried herself and her inquisitive nature. I could tell that Cates created her office space as a comforting place for students to come and to sit and to talk about life beyond her classroom.
“She is very down to earth. She gave us all her phone number and lots of professors don’t do that,” Eliana Gordillo, sophomore education major, said. “Around Thanksgiving, she was like ‘If anyone’s not going home, you can come over for Thanksgiving.’”
Cates is known around campus and to her students as not only a professor but a friend who is willing and eager to help those around her. She cares deeply for her student’s success in and outside of her classes, and she prepares them by sharing her own life experiences with them.
“She did a lot of teaching and then she served as principal as well, so she just has a lot of different experience from different settings. Her love for teaching is really evident and she’s really passionate about it and she just wants us to be passionate about it,” Gordillo said. “In education, we talk a lot about caring for the whole child and that means their academic needs, their emotional, physical, and all those different things. I feel like she really practices what she preaches. She is there for all of us if we need anything.”
Cates believes in an open-door policy. Her desire is to see her students feel comfortable enough to ask her about hard things and to learn from someone who has been through it before, no matter what the issue is.
“They tell me they like hearing my stories,” Cate explained. “They like hearing the experiences I’ve navigated and made it through to help them see you are gonna have some bumps in the road, but it doesn’t mean you’re not cut out for this. It doesn’t mean the Lord isn’t gonna walk you through where you need to be. And I think that’s helpful that they see the humanness in each of us.”
Even in her time as an assistant principal, Cate believed in this idea of being available to those around her.
“I would keep chocolate in my office and my teachers would often come by and just say ‘I need a piece of chocolate.’ And a lot of times, it was just that, it was a piece of chocolate. But other times they would tell me about something they were stressed about and there might be a way I could help. Or they would come in and just kind of be able to process for a moment and feel better when they left. I enjoy that relational aspect of teaching,” Cates said.
Cates’ love for her students and their growth impacts the way that she teaches and specifically teaches future educators. Her desire is for them to recognize that the children who walk into their classrooms are more than just students: they are people with a story and with an ability to learn and to grow.
“I always say, ‘Students are not academic vessels to be filled.’ They are holistic human beings that don’t drop everything that’s not academic when they come into my classroom. They have to know that I see them as Olivia, who loves to write, or this person who loves this sport, or this young lady who is so enmeshed in her Greek life that she bleeds her sorority’s colors. It’s good to know those things because they feel seen for more than a name in a gradebook, and that’s what Union is about,” Cates said.
This teacher is right. Good teachers build relationships with their students, so they can teach them.