Clarke Central High School English department teacher Grace Brownlee stands in her classroom on Feb. 12. Although Brownlee attended college outside of her hometown of Athens, she soon discovered her desire to return. “I realized that Athens was where I wanted to be. Not just because my family was here, but just because I love it here,” Brownlee said. “I’m a homebody-kind-of person. I don’t feel limited by staying in one place. I feel like there’s a lot I can do here.” Photo by Krista Shumaker
Clarke Central High School first-year English department teacher Grace Brownlee was one of the first in her family to experience college outside of Athens. Following her years at Kennesaw State University, Brownlee returned with hopes of implementing her newly developed skills and perspectives.
Natalie Ripps: Would you tell me just a little bit about yourself to start off?
Grace Brownlee: Sure. So I grew up in Athens and I went to college at Kennesaw State (University). I’ve wanted to be a teacher for a long time and I also have wanted to teach at Clarke Central for a long time. It’s my first year here and I’m loving it. I didn’t (go to CCHS), but most of my family and my friends did.
NR: Did your family members attend college? If so, where?
GB: I have two siblings. My brother went to UGA and my sister went to (Athens Technical College).
NR: Why did you decide to go to Kennesaw State then?
GB: So I went to Kennesaw State because I needed a break from the people I went to high school with. That’s one of the answers. Everyone I needed a break from was going to (University of Georgia) and I liked UGA, but I just kind of needed to take a step back. Another big reason was that they have the top program in the state for what I wanted to study. I had heard really great things about their English education program and I went to visit the campus and it was just beautiful. My boyfriend at the time, who is my husband now, was there, and I had a lot of friends there so it was a nice way for me to get just a little bit away, but be close enough that I could come home when I wanted to.
NR: So what was it like being apart from your siblings?
GB: It was hard. It was fine at first, because I needed some distance. After about two years, I realized that Athens was where I wanted to be. Not just because my family was here, but just because I love it here. A lot of it was, like, if my family was celebrating something and I couldn’t be there I didn’t like it. Also, I’m pretty far in age from my siblings. So it wasn’t until I was older that we were really friends. So the older I got and the closer I got to them, the more I miss being around them. It’s gonna be different for everybody, though. I definitely encourage people to go off a little bit for school, but I’m a homebody-kind-of person. I don’t feel limited by staying in one place. I feel like there’s a lot I can do here. So for me, knowing that I wanted to be here and being somewhere else got really difficult. After about two years I was ready to come back.
NR: When did you decide that you wanted to go into the English area?
GB: I think when I was a freshman in high school. So I’ve always known that I wanted to be a teacher, but, when I was a freshman in high school I read a book for the first time that was more than just a book for me. I felt like it was something that made me a better person. From there, I just kind of took English and ran with it and it became my favorite and best subject. I had always seen it as my favorite subject, but it wasn’t until my senior year that I had a teacher who was actually a professor from UGA, because I was dual enrolled, who just made me love it. And so that was where I grew a lot as a writer and really decided that that’s what I wanted to do.
NR: Why not any other schools farther from Athens?
GB: Because it was close enough that I could still be involved. I still had a lot of family here. I also had a best friend whose mom had cancer and she was staying here, so I was close enough that I could be near her. But again, really Kennesaw State because the campus was beautiful, the English program was fantastic and my boyfriend was there.
NR: How was your experience studying English there?
GB: It was fantastic. Their English ed program is incredibly difficult and rigorous, but also wonderful. I feel like I was really prepared for what to do with my job. I also got a lot of really cool opportunities there outside of just what I had to do for classes. I worked in the Writing Center at Kennesaw State for three years, where I was tutoring college students from freshman in college all the way to people getting their PhD. That meant that I got to teach writing to people of all kinds of different abilities. I also tutored a lot of students with physical or learning disabilities or students whose first language wasn’t English, so I got a lot of practice through that and that prepared me really well. And then I also got to go to the National Council of Teachers of English conference my senior year. They selected three of us to go to St. Louis (Mo.) and present about writing at a conference and I got to do that and so that was a really great experience. They also do a lot of field experience, so for classes I had requirements to go to schools and I worked in an elementary school, two middle schools and a high school, so I got to experience lots of different schools and made sure that high school is where I wanted to be.
NR: How did you implement what you learned from those opportunities at CCHS?
GB: So I would say that that experience was one of the most helpful things in preparing me to teach at Clarke Central because there are so many different abilities in my classroom. I have kids who are just better writers than I would ever expect a high school student to be, and I have to really rise to that and be ready to pull that to challenge them, and I learned how to do that by tutoring students at the Writing Center. At the same time, I have students where writing is their worst nightmare and they really need help feeling like they can do it and that was also a lot of what I did in college. I learned how to make writing less scary, so it’s definitely something I’ve been able to bring to my students.
NR: So how do you help students that struggle with writing?
GB: Honestly, I think that the biggest part of (helping the students) is just making it less scary. When you read instructions for writing an essay and it’s all there, it can be really intimidating. So, a lot of what I’ll do is show them how to break down those instructions and start with what they do know and then figure out how to get to what they don’t know. I also teach the importance of the writing process. So a lot of students get really bogged down if their first draft isn’t good, but the first draft isn’t supposed to be good. The first draft is just supposed to be all your ideas on a paper. Once you kind of get that idea across, it’s so much less intimidating. Once they’re all their ideas are on paper, then we can work with the actual writing. So breaking it down and letting it be a step by step process helps a lot.
NR: So returning to Athens did you develop any new perspectives?
GB: Yeah, I was just a different person than I was when I moved, because I took that break. I took the distance. Staying with the same people from high school into college kind of gives you a security blanket that can be dangerous. I had a few friends from high school up in Kennesaw, a few friends that went to Clarke Central, but, those were my really close friends who I needed, but I could still change and grow into a new person. I got to meet new people and experience who I wanted to be and mold that before I came back which was really good. It gave me an opportunity to figure out who I was, and that definitely made me more successful and made me able to bring an attitude back that was ready to be successful.
