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Teacher’s Aid Cornelius author pens insightful new book for educators BY: » Karel Bond Lucander PHOTOGRAPHY BY: » Lisa Crates
Retired educator Colleen Thrailkill spent more than 35 years teaching elementary school.
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ife is full of teachable moments, and for an educator, those moments can be carried into the classroom. Colleen Thrailkill’s joy and passion for teaching motivated her to write The Value of Rotting Pumpkins: The Art of Teaching Elementary School. Her 211-page “guide to being a creative and an effective teacher” is packed with curriculum ideas, teaching philosophy and prac14 LimitlessMagOnline.com | April 2021
tical strategies for navigating teacher life. She explores how to take advantage of those teachable moments, meet the needs of every learner, and bring real-world problem solving into the classroom. Her book helps educators interact with administrators, conduct parent-teacher conferences, organize competitions and clubs, support gender equity in the classroom, teach reading and math and much more.
Extensive teaching resources She began writing her book last April, as COVID-19 was shutting everything down. She wrote eight pages a day and likens the process to working on a doctoral dissertation. Thrailkill began teaching in 1974 and received her Doctor of Education (Ed.D.) in 1999. She finished her book last fall and self-published through Archway.
“The easy part was the funny and touching teacher stories I carried in my memories for years—spilling paint on a group of five kids, having a child tell me he’d received a “great pair of knees” for Christmas (turned out to be a Great Pyrenees puppy) and learning that the parent of a student was dying of cancer,” says Thrailkill. “As I wrote the book, I made a careful effort to document every teaching resource I mentioned so the
