Amber Brown kneels on a Technicolor carpet with a cluster of first graders — or as she usually calls them, “friends” — calmly leading them through math worksheets. “I want you to look at that number and the other number and make them match,” she quietly tells one student. 

“She is the embodiment of an elementary school teacher,” says an admiring colleague: reassuring, steady, kind. As the lead teacher of the first grade, she spends hours every week preparing the curriculum for her colleagues, but she also can pivot in her classroom when she sees her students become passionate about a new idea.

She’s married and has two children at Charlotte Latin School. Before she was wed, however, she had possibly the perfect name for a first grade teacher: Miss Gentle. “Maybe I should have kept it at school, but I went all-in,” she says cheerfully. “It was like the name of the teacher in a book.”

Why are you a first grade teacher?

Growing up, I always knew I wanted to be a teacher. When teachers were giving out blank copies of things, I would hoard them so I could play school with my sister. I’ve always felt that was what I was destined to be. The big kids who are the same size as me are wonderful, and there are people who are meant to be with them, but I’ve always felt called to the younger population. Seeing life through their eyes is one of my favorite things: they have such unfiltered innocence and they bring the smallest things to your attention. They have so much joy and light.

How much change do you see in first graders across the year?

The change is exponential. When they come to us, they’ve never had their own desk; they’ve never had their own supplies that they’re in charge of. You can see their chests puff out: This is big-time. They come to us having studied numbers up to 10, sometimes 20, and they leave able to add and subtract numbers up to 80. They come to you sounding out words, and they leave reading connected text fluently, so confident and proud of themselves. 

Even high-achieving students have room for growth. I always talk about that with my students: no matter how good somebody is at their craft, whether it’s LeBron James at basketball or Tiger Woods at golf, they do the minutiae every day. They put in that mundane extra work because that sets you up for success in the long run.

How do you help make that happen?

In first grade, there’s phonics every single day. Each week the students record themselves, blending lines of words with sounds that we’ve taught, so I can assess them. If you notice someone struggling with fluency, that means they need to strengthen their phonics and their comprehension — their brain isn’t capturing everything that they’re reading. You work for the fluency to be more automatic, which alleviates the cognitive load for them so they can understand what they’re reading.

What attracted you to Latin?

At my previous job, I felt that students were just data points. They were numbers and letters and levels, and those were the only things driving my conversations with anybody outside the classroom. When I came here, I found that there was so much more autonomy in how we supported families and kids.

Can you give an example?

In the last few years, we’ve noticed that life is really fast-paced for families. People are fully scheduled, and they have a hard time being bored. The state of boredom is actually really healthy! We know family schedules are out of our control, but what’s within our control is giving students the opportunity to decide on what they want to do inside our classroom, teaching them to be a healthy risk-taker. So we came up with “Kid Shop”: it’s a bin in each of our classrooms with activities like coloring, stencils, and games. We schedule Kid Shop a few days during the week and it’s one of the things the students look forward to most. They don’t realize they’re working on fine motor skills or conflict resolution.

When you were young, you lived in South Africa for a couple of years. What memories stand out from that time?

I was around 12 turning 13 in that time: it was the 90s, post-apartheid, when Nelson Mandela was president. My stepdad was in the jewelry business and the diamond business, so he was working in Kimberley, South Africa, and my parents thought it would be an amazing experience for us to spend time there. The country can make you feel small: Table Mountain is ginormous, and the beaches are so picturesque. There’s a spot [Cape Agulhas] where two oceans meet. I never went on a safari, but we saw lots of monkeys. They will barricade the road and sit there and look at you: they know you can’t do anything and they’re very dangerous. The baboons are pretty aggressive.

How are you a better teacher now than when you arrived at Latin?

I have the time and the autonomy now to be more reflective in my practices. I’ve grown as a writer because we try to write beautiful report cards. We help parents to find things to celebrate, and to know that their kid is loved. I was a DEI co-coordinator, alongside Avery Teichman, and that helped me understand the depth of what we teach our kids and how long it sticks with them. I’ve definitely grown in my comfort talking about things that are going on in the world. When I was a younger teacher, I did not even feel comfortable as a white woman speaking on the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., but my husband, who is Black, said, “Well, if you aren’t comfortable with it, how do you think your kids of color feel with you not acknowledging it?” 

I talk to my students about how the world is never going to be a perfect place, but our job is to bring the kindness and the love and the respect to everybody that we encounter, regardless of their choices for themselves in this world. That’s another thing I love about being a first-grade teacher: the amount of empathy that children have. I wish we could all keep that through our entire lives.

After a decade at Latin, you have former students in all three divisions. 

I hope they remember me, and remember being in my room and feeling loved and appreciated. On Community Day, it was wonderful to see my former students and ask them questions. And some of them still want to give me hugs, which is awesome. Not only do I get to see students and their families throughout their academic career here, they get to see me and see my family morphing and changing. It’s a great sense of community.

What haven’t you done yet in your life that you would like to?

I would love to teach teachers at the university level, igniting the love of teaching in others and showing them how you can really change the lives of children.

Any final thoughts?

Whenever people ask me about Latin, I tell them that it’s an amazing place to be. Our kids are so fortunate for the experiences they have here, the people they have in their lives, and the connections they make for a lifetime. It’s like the Disney World of education: when you come here, people are smiling, they’re helpful, they want to be here, they love their job. I love being here and I love every opportunity that’s come my way here. I truly believe that this is a place that is happy.