Cutlines – (Girl)

Third-grade teacher Amanda Wilkins reads with student Taylor Brooks during silent reading time on the first day of school at Strong Elementary on Wednesday.

(Boy)

Third-grade teacher Amanda Wilkins reads with student Cody White during silent reading time on the first day of school at Strong Elementary on Wednesday.

STRONG
Teacher reports great first day in debut with third-grade class

STRONG – Chairs are stacked on the desks, reading books are stuffed into homework folders, which are stuffed into backpacks, and students are lined at the door waiting for their bus to be called.

The first day of classes at Strong Elementary School is over, and third-grade teacher Amanda Knapp Wilkins survived her first day of teaching her own class.

“It went well, really well. The kids were excited to be back,” she said Wednesday. “I got through everything. I couldn’t believe it.”

She considers herself lucky to have the students who are in her class. “I could give them a task and send them off, and they’d do it,” she said.

Teaching was an obvious career choice for Wilkins – she’s simply carrying on the family business.

“I’ve grown up in it, and I love to be around kids,” she said.

Her mother, Debbie Knapp, teaches third grade in Kingfield, and Debbie’s father was a teacher and principal in Massachusetts. On Wilkins’ father’s side, her grandmother Lil Knapp has worked for SAD 58 over the past 40 years, her cousin Adam Masterman is an art teacher in Kingfield and Stratton, and her uncle Wayne Knapp is retired from teaching science at Mt. Abram.

“It’s nice to be in a profession, where there is so much experience,” Wilkins said. “I can go to my mom and lean on her. She has so many ideas.”

“For me, it’s really, really exciting,” Knapp said of having her daughter in the same district, teaching the same grade. “It’s just amazing to see her happy and glowing and being a part of the same team.”

Through junior high and into her first year of high school, Wilkins wanted nothing to do with being a teacher, Knapp said. “Then she came home and said, ‘I really think I should be a teacher. I really like kids.’

“She’s always been really good with kids. She can get down on their level. When she talks to kids, her whole face lights up. There’s a connection between her and the kids. They really respond to her.”

Lil Knapp said she was excited to learn that her granddaughter would be teaching in SAD 58.

“Last year she taught up north, and we never got to see her,” she said of Wilkins’ year teaching in Kenduskeag as a half-time second-grade teacher and ed tech. “It’s good to have them all close.”

Lil Knapp said she doesn’t know why so many in her family have been drawn to education.

“They follow the line, maybe,” she said. “It’s what they chose to do. They all like children.”

A Mt. Abram Regional High School 2001 graduate, Wilkins said she is grateful to have the opportunity to teach in the district where she grew up.

“I want to give back to the community that I came from,” she said. “For me, it was the best education I could get.”

She has observed and taught in other districts, and it’s not the same, she said. “It’s the way the teachers teach the students in this district. I learned this way, and I want to help kids learn.”