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EDITOR’S NOTE: The Valley Times-News is doing a Q&A with all of the teachers of the year in the Springwood School. Today, we are writing about Savannah Pickels, a second-grade teacher. We asked her several questions and included some of our favorite responses below.

Savannah Pickels, an elementary teacher at Springwood School, knows that she will probably be the only “Ms. Pickels” some students have and she makes the most of it. 

She has been in education for nine years. Although she considered other pathways, fate had different plans for her and she wound up exactly where she belonged. 

Pickels studied kinesiology in college, but after graduating, she took a position as a teacher’s assistant at Hollis Hand Elementary in Troup County. Eventually, she continued her training and became a lead teacher there. She found her niche in second grade and has been there ever since.

This year, Pickels made the move to Springwood School where she serves as the elementary school’s second-grade teacher. Since being there, she has enjoyed the creative freedom and mentorship she has had at the school.

Pickels, her husband and their two children live in and go to school in Troup County.

If you weren’t a teacher what career field would you be in?

“I think that I would have ended up going the Kinesiology route, and eventually realized that I wanted to do something with pediatrics. Because I just gravitate towards kids. You know, you have a patient, they get better and they go but what I’ve really enjoyed about teaching any grade level, just teaching in general, is like you build a relationship with a kid and their family, and then you keep up with them.”

What hidden talent might surprise your students and our readers?

“I can walk on my hands. I was a gymnast, and I can still do that.”

What’s the most creative or interesting project one of your classes has worked on?

“We do National Pickle Day every year, and on that day, each student will volunteer to bring in something pickled, not necessarily just pickles. So we just integrate all subjects and make them pickle-based… we taste and we graph whether they liked it or not. So that’s the math lesson. Our writing lesson is about how to pickle something … That’s my favorite day of the year.”

If you could invite any historical figure to speak at one of your classes, who and why?

“Shawn Johnson or Simone Biles. Because there’s a lot of lessons that I learned being a gymnast that contribute to life. Something we talked about today was not everything you learn in a classroom is academic. It’s not about numbers or words or letters, and you’re going to learn some things about life that make learning academics easier, like group work or problem-solving, things like that, things that are going to give you grit.”

What’s the most rewarding part of your job?

“There’s a lot of things, but I think it ties back into the relationships you make with the students and their families … [When they think] back to a time or a memory that they made with me is really special.”

As your students transition to the next grade what is one key takeaway you hope they carry forward from their time in your class?

“I always tell them they can do hard things, and I always remind them that it’s going to get harder. So, third grade is going to be harder than second grade, second grade is going to be harder than first grade. But they can do hard things, and I hope that they’ve learned problem-solving skills and how to work together because we sometimes need each other to do hard things.”