Why Should Delaware Care?
While public school education has focused on test scores in recent decades, mental health is also an increasing need for students. One Wilmington teacher has been celebrated for her work in boosting the confidence of her students.
Anitra Green said her daughter, Amari, was shy when she started the fifth grade, six years ago. She was an only child who sometimes withdrew from conversations.
Then, as Amari’s fifth-grade year progressed, Green noticed a change. Her daughter began to grow more confident. At one point, she even agreed to sit in on an interview that was published in the New York Times.
Amari’s shyness diminished, her mother said, because she had Jasmyn Wright as her teacher.
Green said Wright’s teaching methods, which include call-and-response affirmations, empowered her daughter and ultimately fostered a mentoring relationship between Amari and Wright that led them both to that interview.
“[Amari] admired everything from Miss Wright’s professionalism, how she carried herself, [and] the greetings that she did with her children,” Green said. “She would come home talking about the different affirmations that they would say.”
Those affirmations are what Wright has coined as her “push through” mantra. Wright uses a call-and-response system where she asks students what they will do if something is too hard, and they respond that they will “push through!”
In 2016, a video of Wright and her former class in Philadelphia reciting the “push through” chant went viral. After a while, Wright became recognized across the globe and she briefly shifted to become a consultant.
But after a year, she decided to go back into the classroom, and began teaching in Delaware.
Today, a copy of the chant lives behind her desk at the Bayard School in Wilmington, which is a part of the Christina School District.
Wright said her students may not always get through the entire “push through” chant, but they do say general affirmations every day.
Some students also come to Wright for encouragement or to tell her about the trauma they may be experiencing at home. Together they will then use positive affirmations to help the student cope with what they are experiencing.
Wright’s work has also attracted the attention of The Varkey Foundation, an organization that aims to address global education challenges. Wright was among the top 10 finalists for the foundation’s GEMS Education Global Teacher Prize.
“The Global Teacher Prize was created with a simple mission: to shine a light on teachers like you – educators whose dedication, creativity, and compassion deserve to be celebrated and shared with the world,” said Sunny Varkey, the founder of the Global Teacher Prize, GEMS Education, and The Varkey Foundation, in a press release.
‘It really made me feel really special’
Making it into the top 10 for the Global Teacher Prize, out of more than 5,000 applications, was not something Wright expected.
She originally was not going to apply for the prize, which awards $1 million to the winner, because she felt like she was not good enough to be considered. Like some of her students, Wright admitted that she sometimes deals with her own imposter syndrome.
Then, Wright received an email saying the application deadline had been pushed back two weeks. She took it as a sign to apply.
Wright’s students at the Bayard School were not surprised to see her efforts being recognized.
And they have cheered her along in the journey, with some changing their computer screens to her picture, and others having made posters and paper hats with slogans like the “top-10 push through.”
Last week, The Varkey Foundation announced its winner, Rouble Nagi – a teacher in India who for “two decades has helped bring more than 1 million children into the formal education system through the use of art,” according to the organization.
Although Wright did not win, current and former students have praised her teaching style and have called her their favorite teacher.
Ronnisha Butts is another parent who credits Wright with helping her child “open up out of her shell.”
Butts’ daughter, DeRyn Coffield, had Wright as her fifth-grade teacher two years ago at Joseph E. Johnson Elementary in the Red Clay Consolidated School District.
She saw a change in DeRyn’s attitude as she prepared to present her Black History Month project.
Butts said that before DeRyn had Wright as a teacher, she completed projects but did not want to present them in front of her classmates. But DeRyn was not “not nervous at all” in the days leading up to her Black History Month presentation.
Instead, she was excited and asked her mom to help her buy and pick out an outfit so she could dress up as Ruby Bridges, a civil rights activist who was the first African-American child to attend a formerly whites-only school in Louisiana.
“I’ve never seen her like that,” Butts said. “So to me as a parent, it really made me feel special to know that even when I’m not around, somebody else has DeRyn’s back.”
