We all have at least one or two teachers who we remember long into adulthood.
Whether we remember them for being really awesome, or really terrible, certain teachers just make a memorable impact on their students.
Longtime St. Joseph teacher Candi Appl is one of those teachers. Of course, I remember her as being one of my really awesome teachers.
Mrs. Appl was my sixth grade homeroom teacher. She taught literature and language to the sixth graders at St. Joseph Middle School.
Mrs. Appl has taught in the St. Joseph School District for 30 years, nearly all of her teaching career. For the first 20 years, she spent her days with sixth graders all day long, teaching them the importance of reading and writing.
In Mrs. Appl’s class we read the Hobbit. We created our own newspapers, writing articles about books we had chosen to read for the project.
But the most memorable thing I learned in Mrs. Appl’s class was not content related. She taught me how to be confident in myself. She taught me that it is okay to be whoever I want to be. She stood up for me when I didn’t know how to stand up for myself. She made me feel like I was important, not just like another student. And she fostered my love of writing.
For the last 10 years of her career, Mrs. Appl has devoted her time to teaching Computers to students throughout the grade and middle school.
She teaches kindergarteners how to use a mouse.
“With the little ones I teach familiarity with the mouse, keyboarding familiarity, just basics,” she said.
She instructs fifth graders on the basics of building a website. She goes farther with web design with her eighth graders.
“Every year the kids are a little bit better with the technology,” she said. “They are a lot better with the technology, but they are not better with the actual desktop computer.”
In the world today, familiarity with technology is absolutely necessary to survive in almost any workplace. In Mrs. Appl’s class, kids are learning skills that will get them interested in new areas, and that will help them survive and thrive in any job.
Mrs. Appl’s classes are unique because she created the entire curriculum.
Over the last 10 years, she has poured her time, her money, and her extensive teaching experience into creating projects and assignments that not only teach students how to use computers, but give them knowledge and skills that will carry over to other areas of their education and their lives as well.
For example, with her younger students she is working on a project right now to use technology to create a set of flash cards with information about the Presidents that they can use in other classes.
Aside from basic computer skills, she also teaches the importance of online safety.
With the rise of smartphones and the greater access to the Internet, kids can put themselves at risk if they aren’t careful.
“Parents are very naive about what their kids are doing online. I know the kids are getting into dangerous stuff.
“Any app can be dangerous for a kid if they are not using it in the proper way. There’s apps today that when a kid puts it on their phone, it’ll look like something that it’s totally not and until you’re into the app you won’t know what it is.”
She also introduces fun activities like working with robots.
But for her, the most important thing she teaches isn’t content related at all.
For Mrs. Appl, the most important thing she teachers is “how to collaborate with others. How to communicate with others. With the computers, and Twitter, and whatever it might be, they don’t have those communication skills.
“There are very few jobs where you won’t have to work with others. The other thing is respect. For your elders, and for your classmates.”
Mrs. Appl truly cares about each and every one of her students.
When I asked her what her favorite thing about teaching was, with hesitation she responded “Oh the kids, definitely. Sometimes it’s achievements and their progress. Sometimes it’s not in a subject matter, it’s their maturity and their growth. But it’s the reward of the kids.”
Since starting teaching 30 years ago, the biggest thing that she has seen change is the family unit and the strain on kids who are busy all the time.
“The whole family unit has changed so much. Kids are too busy. To sit down for a family dinner is rare.”
She worries about the communication skills of kids who learned at a young age how to work an iPhone but have not learned how to express themselves and communicate on a face-to-face level.
She has seen a change in students from when she first started teaching. With the rise of social media and video games, and the decline of communication skills and time to be a kid, she has seen an increase in anxiety and depression in young kids.
“As a school district, we see more kids struggling mentally with anxiety and those types of issues. Anxiety and depression in kids.
“I think some of that comes from not having a way to decompress and not having a close friend group to turn to.”
She believes kids need to disconnect from the social media and the video games and have time to decompress, and they aren’t doing that often enough.
Mrs. Appl is retiring this year and that announcement was not met with excitement from her students.
She has had parents contact her because they are sad that she will not be here to teach their children. She has had students cry in her classroom because she will not be here to teach them next year.
And while that tugs at the heartstrings, it is also a testament to just how much of an impact that Mrs. Appl has had in her 30 years at St. Joseph.
Mrs. Appl is sad about retiring.
She’s excited to have more time to travel and spend time with her grandkids, but she will miss the students.
Her plans for after retirement include traveling to Florida, and Europe, and Maine, and hopefully Alaska. She also plans to have more time to attend her grandkids sporting events.
She’s also planning on coming back to sub so she’ll still get to spend time with the students that cares about so much.
It is impossible to measure the impact that Mrs. Appl has had on hundreds and hundreds of students in her 30 years of teaching.
And not just the impact on those students, but also the impact that those students have made on the world because of the things she taught them.
Mrs. Appl taught me to follow my dreams. She is a big part of why I love to write.
Even today, we are Facebook friends and she still reads my writing and encourages me often.
She also taught me to be a kind person every day to everyone. Teaching kindness is important to her to this day. This sign is posted on her whiteboard and also taped next to each computer in her room.
Mrs. Appl may be retiring, but she will continue to make a difference in the world through the kids that she has taught the importance of being kind, of being respectful, and of working together with others.
The St. Joseph School District has so many great teachers, but It is without a doubt that Mrs. Appl is one of the best.
