Autum Chaffin

Tell us why you became a teacher

I became a teacher to guide and support students through life by learning academically and emotionally.

Tell us about your most memorable teaching experience

My most memorable teaching experience is everyday. However, my school is arts-based. For a lesson during the fall, I had my students create mini sight word pumpkins where they wrote a sight word on the pumpkin and decorated it. Once they created their pumpkin, they created a sentence using the sight word they chose.

What would you do with the $25,000?

Honestly, I don’t know what I would do. But as cliché as this sounds, I think I truly would use some of it to donate to my students’ learning. We are in a low-income district and we don’t have reading textbooks for first grade. We’ve been printing paper worksheets all year. So I would try to find a way to get them workbooks.