Kelisa Wing is the assistant principal at West Point Elementary School in New York, but she remembers that her relationship with education did not have an ideal start.
As a first-grader, she struggled in the classroom because of problems at home. Her parents’ fighting took an emotional toll on Wing, and her performance at school suffered. Wing’s teacher scheduled a conference with her mother to inform her that Wing would need to repeat first grade.
“It was very embarrassing,” says Wing. “I felt like a failure. I remember watching my friends moving on, and I was staying back.”
She says she only began sharing this story after winning the 2017 Department of Defense Education Activity Teacher of the Year Award.
Looking back, she took away an important lesson from what happened to her in first grade, particularly from her first-grade teacher’s behavior.
“The thing that stuck out to me [was] she never really stopped to ask what was happening in our personal lives,” she says. “She just gave up on me.”
After a successful second year in first grade and decades of success that followed, Wing says this incident forced her to re-think the meaning of failure. She integrated these reflections into her teaching.
