Claudia Beard already has bought 15 notebooks.
She’s also got 3-by-5 recipe cards she’ll use for future lessons, too. She’ll give the cards to students and show them the recipe on how to be a good doctor, a good teacher or a good citizen. Then there is her collection of children’s books.
She wants 1,000. She already has 100 at HPU.
“I’m a sucker for rhyming,” she says. “It keeps students engaged.”
Yes, Beard wants to be a teacher, and these are her future school supplies.
It’s a family thing. Her grandmother was a teacher, her mom is a teacher and one of her professors says she has the charisma, classroom management skills and “authentic enthusiasm” she needs to excel.
Her hard work has paid off. Seven months before her graduation, seven months before she earns her degree in elementary education, HPU has named her the school’s Extraordinary Leader for November.
The School of Education, her second home, has shaped her. She says she feels like she lives on its first-floor couches studying.
But people have shaped her, too.
Following Her Abuelita
At first, Beard wanted to be a vet. When she was a second-grader, she came to school for its career day carrying a stuffed dog and wearing fake glasses, a plastic stethoscope and her dad’s white long-sleeve shirt as a lab coat.
She did the same thing as a third- and fourth-grader. But by the fifth grade, she listened to her teacher talk about her career.
Her name was Mrs. Johnson. That’s all Beard remembers. But with what she heard, she can’t forget how it made her feel.
“A flame started in my heart,” she says.
Beard’s Cuban grandmother, Rosario Martinez, helped that flame grow.
She had escaped from Cuba with her husband, Beard’s grandfather, in 1960. She settled in Chicago and eventually became the matriarch of three generations of a large extended family. Beard called her Abuelita.
Beard recalls her family get-togethers fondly. At least 50 people would converge for Christmas Eve, or Noche Buena. They’d celebrate with roasted pig, black beans, plantain chips and flan, or caramelized custard.
Beard remembers her grandmother’s flan – and her kitchen. Beard would smell the tang of the mojo sauce and see her grandmother, a short woman with brownish red hair, around a sizzling frying pan creating something for her.
Beard eventually told her grandmother she wanted to be a teacher. That’s when she heard her grandmother was a teacher, too, in Cuba.
“All that inspired me to take this path,” she says.
Her grandmother died when Beard was 13. Still, she thinks about her often today.
“All the time,” Beard responds. “I think she’d be proud because I’m doing what I love.”
Beard’s Spanish, A Gift Given
Beard ventured east for college because she was sick of Chicago weather. When she came to HPU, walked into the School of Education and met the professors, she immediately was sold.
Since then, she has told her story to many prospective students and their families. She is a University Ambassador who gives campus tours every week. She’s also a captain, one of 10, who oversees a team of University Ambassadors.
But that’s not all. She is a Presidential Scholar; a member of Alpha Lambda Delta, the collegiate honor society for first-year college students; a member of Kappa Delta Pi, the International Honor Society in Education; and captain of HPU’s women’s lacrosse club.
“That’s my secret weapon,” Beard says of lacrosse laughing.
Last year in High Point, she worked with the Salvation Army’s Angel Tree program and helped provide Christmas assistance for families who needed financial help.
In doing so, she used the Spanish she first learned from her Abuelita and her mother, a Spanish teacher. Beard would see families come in, all quiet and tense with hunched shoulders. Then, she’d speak to them in Spanish.
Everything changed.
“Their shoulders would go back immediately, and they’d smile,” she says today. “They felt welcomed. That whole experience took my breath away.”
An Unmistakable Presence
Dr. James Davis couldn’t help notice what he calls “authentic enthusiasm” in Beard. He says he sees that with many students he teaches. But with Beard, it was different.
“She embraces that commitment to teaching fully – it’s every day – and you know, I get cold chills to think about what she’ll be able to do for students and student achievement,” Davis says. “I’m so proud of her.”
In January, Beard will continue her yearlong stint of student teaching at a local elementary school. After graduation, Beard plans to obtain at HPU a master’s degree in educational leadership. Then, she plans to teach overseas.
She already has a country picked out – Spain.
Two years ago, she spent five months there with HPU’s Study Abroad program, and she chose Seville, Spain, a 2,200-year-old city in the country’s southern corner. There, Beard studied Spanish and learned much.
First, she became good friends with her roommate, Taylor Coakley, an HPU student she didn’t know. They’re still close.
She visited Morocco, Portugal and Italy. In Seville, she walked its narrow streets, bathed in the shadow of old buildings, and imagined how explorer Christopher Columbus did the very same thing centuries before.
But the big deal for Beard was her host family. The mother’s name was Rosario.
Same as her grandmother.
For her, it was a sign. A good sign. Her grandmother, she approves.