Beverley Mahy Rannow
I was born and raised in Southampton, England. At age 14, my parents immigrated to the United States. We settled in Westland, Michigan where I completed high school at John Glenn in 1970. I graduated at 16, three months before my seventeenth birthday.
I spent my first two years of college at Henry Ford Community College where I took the required courses necessary to pursue a career in education. I transferred in 1972 to Eastern Michigan University to complete my degree. I earned a Bachelor of Arts, Magna cum Laude and received my Michigan Provisional Teaching Certification in June of 1974. Throughout this period, I volunteered as a Girl Scout Leader and Sunday school teacher. During the summers to earn money for school, I worked as a camp counselor at various Girl Scout camps.
After graduation from Eastern, I joined the Peace Corps. I worked as an Elementary Education volunteer in Kabala in Sierra Leone. I was assigned to a Muslim primary school and was responsible to the Ministry of Education. While there, I taught a third grade level class, conducted methods and visual-aids workshops in the area of science, made English and math skill games for student use, compiled a pamphlet and visual-aids file that was put in the Teacher's Resource Center, and established a children's library at the primary school I was assigned to. This experience was truly life changing. Consequently, my Christian faith deepened and my longtime interest in hunger and justice issues began.
Upon returning home to Michigan in February 1976, I substitute taught for the remainder of that school year in a number of suburbs west of Detroit. After the summer, I moved to Grand Rapids and worked as an aide in the Vietnamese bilingual program of Grand Rapids Public Schools for the first six weeks of the school year. I was then offered a teaching position by Grand Rapids Public Schools at Hall Elementary School. I taught second grade for the remainder of the school year. The school was located in a poor, multi-cultural neighborhood that was primarily Hispanic. I really enjoyed this position because it was both rewarding and challenging. I was disappointed when a large decline in enrollment meant that I was laid-off.
While I was teaching at Hall Elementary School, I met and fell in love with my husband, Mike, of 43 years, who is from Racine, Wisconsin. We married the Saturday of Labor Day before he began at Hope College. While Mike was at Hope College, I was unable to find a teaching position, and so I worked at a bank. I began as a teller and then progressed to new accounts assistant before I quit to begin our family when Mike had finished his degree.
I have three children, two boys aged 41, and 39 and a girl aged 35. Just before my second son was born, Terry Moore, the then assistant director of Holland Community Education, asked me if I would teach an English-as-a-Second Language (ESL) class at night. He had become acquainted with my skills through a friend. I was interested in doing some part-time teaching, and so I agreed. I taught ESL at night for five years. During this time, I also returned to school to take graduate classes to fulfill the requirements to gain my Michigan Continuing Teaching Certificate, which I received in March of 1985.
In the fall of 1986, there was an opening in the day program teaching Adult Basic Skills. I applied for this opening and received the job. I have been teaching this class now for eleven years. When I took over the position, the previous teacher had taught using a "skills and drills" workbook approach. I found that while students seemed to make reading level gains they were unable to apply their skills in real-life reading situations. I began looking for a better way to teach reading, so that adult students could improve their reading level and could apply their skills to real-life reading tasks. I became a practitioner researcher, at first on my own and then with the Michigan Adult Education Practitioner Inquiry Project funded by the Michigan Department of Education. I researched the use of the "Reading Workshop" and "Writing Workshop" method of teaching with adults and this research resulted in my writing two articles. The first, "Closing the Gap: Using Reading Workshop with Adult Education Students", was published in Literacy Networks, a journal from Central Michigan University. The second article was "Continuing to Close the Gap: Using Writing Workshop with Adult Education Students”. My students blossomed into readers and writers using these teaching strategies.
In August 1997, I was hired as the media specialist at the middle school in the Otsego Public Schools district just prior to receiving my masters in educational technology and library media science. I worked there for sixteen years. When I began, there was not an established program in the media center and it was not used very much. I worked hard to establish a quality program in the middle school media center that made it the hub of information and learning. I also worked hard to help the teachers integrate technology. In a district that struggled to afford technology, I tried to promote its benefits and helped teachers and students make effective use of it.
In 2010, there were large cuts to education which greatly affected me. I ended up overseeing the elementary media center aides and dividing my time between the high school and middle school. At the end of the school year in 2013, I was told the district was eliminating the library media program and moved to teaching middle school science for the 2013/14 school year. This proved to be more than I bargained for and retired at the end of October 2013.
After retiring, I struggled to find my “place in the world”. A friend challenged me to read the Bible from cover to cover and journal about my perceptions. Through this exercise, God opened and closed doors and opportunities which eventually led to me becoming the Kids Hope director for Third Reformed Church. We were assigned to Vanderbilt Charter Academy and partnered with Hope Reformed Church. This was a new mission for Third and I have had the opportunity to build the program from the bottom up. Kids Hope has turned out to be a perfect match for my skills allowing me to use my teaching expertise and resource knowledge to support the program.
In addition, since Mike’s retirement in 2018, we have begun volunteering with World Renew in disaster relief. We have also begun to attack our travel bucket list. Our first big trip was out to California and back in our camping trailer.
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