Areata Knight Mitchell hooked on teaching

Weeks after graduating from Jamalco’s Noble Foundation-sponsored Advancing Childhood Education Programme, Areata Knight Mitchell is fired up and ready to impart the knowledge received to her students.

Knight Mitchell received targeted training in literacy and numeracy (content and methodology); teaching children with special learning needs (human exceptionalities); and child development, child psychology and behaviour management.

“I have gone back to my job feeling refreshed, renewed and better equipped to facilitate the holistic development of the children entrusted to my care,” said the trained teacher at Sevens Road Basic School, a Methodist institution.

Mitchell, who hails from Mitchell Town in the parish, said long before she entered the classroom, she was tagged a teacher.

“I believe I was tagged a teacher in my mother’s womb,” she told The Gleaner with a teasing smile on her face.

As a grade-one student, teaching seemed the likely path she would take, but by high school, she had her sights set on law.

“However, my parents could not afford to send me to law school after high school, and, as fate would have it, in 1993, I was accepted as a student at the Church Teachers’ College,” she shared.

Mitchell said her intention was to teach for a period and then pursue her dream of attending law school.

She did not count on enjoying the classroom experience so much that she could not walk away, in her own words, “I was hooked!”

“Nothing fulfils me like teaching; teaching is my life. For me, it’s not about the gratuity, it’s about moulding minds and touching lives. There is this feeling of satisfaction and joy that I experience whenever I take a child from ground zero to a level of mastery or exceptionality,” she said.

support for new curriculum

Charged with grooming young minds, Mitchell said she would support a new early-childhood curriculum.

“Within the parameters of the new curriculum, if children are provided with the appropriate opportunities, they will develop in the following areas of wellness, communication, valuing culture, intellectual empowerment, respect for self, others and the environment, and resilience,” she pointed out.

Mitchell said it takes more than an average teacher to stimulate students appropriately, adding that she is far from impressed with those she deems “average” as she said they are not stimulating the nation’s children as they should.

“Average teachers must be honest to themselves. They must make an effort to upgrade; some of us are stuck in the past. It is a new era, one dominated by speed and technology. No teacher should be satisfied with just being average,” she said, adding that if she had the power to make changes, she would reintroduce monthly workshops and training seminars and make attending these mandatory.

“I would also provide early-childhood activity plan modules for early-childhood practitioners to teach from. This would help to ensure that all our children are being provided with the same type of stimulation,” she said.

An ordained pastor, Mitchell is the founder and president of the Clarendon Educators’ Fellowship, an organisation that was formed to help teachers and other citizens of Jamaica to unearth their talents.

Mitchell, who also attended the International University of the Caribbean (IUC), The University of the West Indies, and The Mico University College, was recognised as the best dissertation/thesis writer for the Middlesex region at the IUC on the topic ‘The Impact of Poor Nutrition on the Performance of Students at the Kindergarten Level.’

She was also awarded for outstanding performance in literacy at the graduation ceremony for the Advancing Childhood Education Programme.

Mitchell said her ultimate dream is to be a writer, and she has already started on that goal as she has written a series of integrated early-childhood books, which will be used in early-childhood institutions beginning September of this year.