Amelia Forem Honored As District’s Beginning
Teacher Of The Year
Wellington is well-known for its A-rated schools. Because of this, young families seek out the community, and school administrators aim to hire and retain the best educators out there. Among them is Amelia Forem, recently named Beginning Teacher of the Year at the secondary level by the School District of Palm Beach County.
The award is presented annually to outstanding first-year teachers at the elementary and secondary levels, who have been recommended by their principal for demonstrating excellence.
Wellington Landings Middle School was the first school to call Forem in for an interview.
“Ms. [Blake] Bennett, the principal, is amazing, and she offered me a job at the interview,” Forem recalled. “I couldn’t say no to a job at a such a great school.”
A Broward County native, Forem teaches seventh-grade science. “I’ve wanted to be a teacher since I was in second grade, and I’ve always loved science,” she explained.
Forem holds a bachelor’s degree in biology from Florida State University, and a master’s degree from Florida Atlantic University. She has minors in chemistry and psychology and has taken a few physics classes.
“Biology helps me to know the subject content and enables me to answer any of the crazy questions that the students throw at me, like, ‘What do starfish eat?’” she said.
Even though things can be tough for a first-year teacher, Forem rose to the challenge.
“I liked really getting into teaching,” she said. “I spent so long learning about it that it was fun to be on the other end and immerse myself in the nitty-gritty details. At Wellington Landings, the students are a different breed of kid. They are so well-behaved, so inquisitive — it makes it nice to be a teacher. It gets monotonous if you’re just up there talking all the time. When they’re asking questions, that’s when you’re able to have a little fun.”
Not that there weren’t challenges.
“What many people don’t understand, and even I didn’t understand from my student teaching, is what it takes to keep up,” Forem said. “There are meetings, parent conferences, grading, training, more meetings and a lot of other stuff. That was the challenging part.”
Testing is a key factor in teaching today, but Forem has been able to go over the required material while also keeping up with everything else in the classroom.
“We do a lot of standardized testing,” she said. “There’s a big push for it these days. County, state and diagnostic — those are the three big tests, and it’s continuous throughout the school year. There are definitely a lot, but the standardized testing does give us a goal to aim for. It tells us that the kids need to know this information. But I didn’t seem to have too much trouble fitting in all the material they needed to know, in between all the testing.”
Forem, 25, said that social media has changed everyone’s game — students and teachers alike.
“The kids are all about social media in a different way than my generation was,” she said. “It seems insane, because I’m only a little over 10 years older than they are.”
Many are into cell phones and video games, and spelling can be an issue, since auto-correct is always there to help. They also use more slang terms and are influenced by many celebrities.
“On one hand, it makes it easier to connect with them,” Forem said. “The game Fortnight is the biggest thing with them now. My boyfriend has been playing it for months, so I was able to connect a lot of the things we were learning to the game. Luckily, Ms. Bennett has a strict ‘no cellphone’ policy, so I don’t have to fight for their attention. At home, it’s hard for them to focus. It’s definitely a different generation. That said, they’re more connected to their parents than even I was when I was a kid.”
Technology, however, is also helping teachers up their game.
“I think the increase in technologically savvy students has helped a lot of the teachers,” Forem said. “We have one teacher on our seventh-grade science team who uses computers for everything. The kids respond very well to it. If they have a question, they can just look up the answer immediately. Computers also give a lot of feedback to the teachers. If Bobby only got 5 of the 10 questions right, you know you need to work with him. If Alice got 10 out of 10 correct, you know she’s got it. You also know not to continue teaching with a method that didn’t work.”
With her award, Forem received a certificate, a Citizen watch and a $350 grant. Aside from her family, she gives a lot of credit for the award to her principal, the administrators and her team.
“I wouldn’t have excelled at any other school with any other principal,” Forem said. “Ms. Bennett is so hands-on. She shows us what to do and how to do it. She also has a great open-door policy that has created an atmosphere at the school that makes it very conducive to teaching.”
Another key to her success was getting her master’s degree at FAU.
“As much as I wanted to, I don’t think I would’ve gotten the same education at Florida State for my master’s,” Forem said. “I just wouldn’t have had the same hands-on learning with Palm Beach County children that I got at FAU. I planned on coming home to teach, so FAU was the perfect choice.”
Forem is already looking forward to next year. “I think next year will be easier,” she said. “I’m hoping to have a little bit better handle on the class and the material. Even with my biology degree and those minors, there were still some things I had to look up. Now I know the material, how to plan and how to organize the class. I’m also moving to a real science classroom next year, which will make it easier to do labs. The teachers on my team were such a big help to me my first year. I do not think I would’ve made it without them.”
The Wellington Landings Middle School seventh-grade science team includes Forem, Meredith Byham, Sean Streed and Eric Patino. As for Forem, she wants only one thing as a teacher: “I’m hoping to keep getting better, and for my students to keep getting better,” she said.
