M.V.T. (Most Valuable Teacher)
BY TYSON SMEDSTAD
“She’s amazing.”
If that’s been said once, it’s been said a thousand times.
“She’s amazing. She should get a award or something. It’s truly unbelievable how compassionate and devoted she is to her students. Love her,” Donna Schwarz, parent of Ruud’s student Bella, said.
Bella agreed, “I thought it was an April Fool’s joke at first, but when she actually came, I was very surprised. She’s the best teacher ever.”
Darlene Ruud has been teaching at Bob Callies Elementary for 12 years, five of those years in pre-school and seven years in fifth grade.
Since e-learning started four weeks ago, Ruud has been having her class meet twice a day on Zoom virtual classroom.
With the introduction of improper fractions last week, some students seemed to be having a hard time grasping the advanced subject.
So she packed up their materials and headed out to her students.
“I sat out on the sidewalks and on the steps and wrote it on a white board, and then they were like ‘yes, now I understand’, so they just needed that in person and seeing it,” Ruud said.
Ruud visited five students that afternoon and it took a total of about one hour.
“RaeRae ran into the house and told me to grab my camera if I wanted a picture with her and Mrs. Ruud,” Lisa Maki, mother of Raelyn Maki, a student of Ruud’s said.
“While I wasn’t shocked, I was super touched, to the point of tears. She cares so much about her students that when she could tell via Zoom meetings and personal message chats that a handful of students were just not getting it, she knew she had to try something else,” Maki said. “She offered to come and sit on the sidewalk while the student sat on their front steps. She grabbed her whiteboard, her math book and in her words ‘just did her job.’ She showed RaeRae exactly what she was trying to explain but wasn’t clear on the electronic means. She got to see the exact moment RaeRae ‘got it’ and it took about 15 minutes from beginning to end.”
She even stopped by students from the other fifth grade class since their teacher is on maternity leave.
“Rylie was so excited to see her, and she understood the assignment after that,” Amber Kingbeil, said about Rylie, who is in Jennifer Ude’s fifth class.
