Who am I?

My name is Pam Haskins and I am a 25 year veteran educator. I teach literacy, literature writing, composition, grammar, sentence structure, critical thinking, all that good stuff.  I also teach a very good dose of history; black history, because I don’t think that we’re going to be able to move forward as a nation unless we know all the pieces of the puzzle. 

So, I just want to give you some perspective of who I am and how I view this whole parenting to college process.

I’m an educator.

Professionally, I teach teachers; I show them strategies. I’m an educator who trains other educators. I’m a keynote speaker as well.

And sometimes I love to pick up a drum or have somebody else pick up a drum and I kick my shoes off and I love to do West African dance. That’s a part of the cultural awareness and cultural knowledge that I want my students to have and to embrace. In addition to that, I also create content.

But the greatest part of what I do in my classroom is to share with students –  that’s my greatest joy. I love seeing a wonder in their eyes when they finally get it. I love challenging them to think about things in a way that they’ve never seen before, and supporting them as they struggle. So, they also challenge me to be a better teacher; to be a better person. And that’s something that I want to make sure that you all understand about what I do. 

I currently teach eighth grade, but I have taught K through 16 over the last 25 years. So, in addition to being an educator, I have held classes all over the world and it is nothing more gratifying than to learn a text and be so disconnected from it as I’m sitting in a classroom. The advantage to show up in the place where everything happened, and it come to life for the students is a wonderful feeling. I’ve traveled extensively and I’m so very fortunate to that my employer has created a program where our students are expected to learn about different cultures and then we just show up. 

That’s a lot about me and my professional life. I’m a teacher-mom who likes to read and research for the betterment of the future. I like to see myself as kind of a gardener – literally and figuratively – because I like to plant seeds of knowledge. I like to nurture those seeds so that there’s a bountiful harvest. So, you’ll see me sitting there with my plate of greens which probably came out of our garden with a big old smile on my face because I also love to laugh. 

I’m a wife and mom.

And I want to share with you my partner in crime –  my partner in life for the last almost 30 years. The two of us gardeners have raised three very curious, independent children who have benefited from the information that I’m going to share with you. Now, one thing that my husband, who is the oldest of three, and I’m, you know, the baby of three, he always explained to me was, “Listen, we have to raise these children to be productive adults earlier than later, because they’re going to spend the majority of their lives on earth as adults. So, if we coddle them when they’re little, they’re going not going to be useful adults but grown children who still expect coddling.” And, then the world has grown adult kids. That’s not what we were trying to do. 

Begin with the end in mind.

So, we wanted to make sure that we began with the end in mind and what we wanted to do, with the children that we raised, we want them to have our grandchildren’s grandchildren, raised as wholesome adults. That means that the seeds we planted in them are the replication of the seeds that were planted in us. And we had to keep that going. We absolutely began raising our children with the end in mind because life is really a cycle. We want to make sure that we have a bountiful harvest. We want to start with the seed and beginning with the end in mind, gives parents a perspective of what to do for their children as we move forward units K 16.