Meet Jo Waddell: Favorite Teacher in Best of Bigfork

Jo Waddell is a 23-year-old third grade teacher from Colorado who moved to Bigfork and started her career at Bigfork Elementary right before the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. She won Favorite Teacher and Favorite Local Newbie in the Bigfork Eagle's 2021 Best of Bigfork reader poll.

Despite still feeling like a newbie occasionally, Waddell said her family’s roots run deep in the Flathead Valley. Her family has been here for four generations, and she fondly remembers coming to Montana during the summer and for holidays. When it came time to decide where to go to college, she chose her grandfather’s alma mater: Montana State University in Bozeman. She said her parents retired and moved onto family land outside of Creston, making the decision to student teach at Bigfork Elementary easy.

“I absolutely love working with kids. They’re just so much fun, I don’t know how to describe it. Even on the hard days, you can always find one moment that makes it all better,” Waddell said. “One of the best parts is watching them have that realization, that huge exclamation of understanding. So that’s really cool to see now that I’m in the classroom and I have my own group of kids and I’m building them up from not knowing anything about a subject... and seeing them going into their next grade level understanding,”

Waddell said when she was younger she had no inclination of wanting to teach. With both parents being educators, she basically grew up in the hallways of her school, more so than other kids. Her mother was a principal and her father was a fourth and fifth grade teacher. She remembers being at school early, staying late, and sometimes even being there on weekends.

“So I was like ‘I do not want to be a teacher, this is terrible, never going to be a teacher, never going to do anything like that,’ and then I just kind of naturally fell into it,” Waddell said. “I started watching the other staff’s kids during staff meetings...I did a little bit of tutoring while I was in middle school, and at my high school I got to do a program called ‘Teacher Cadet,’ where you spend a period being a student teacher in a classroom.”

Waddell started her career during the pandemic but she said it was hard to feel the effects of it when she had nothing previous to compare it with. Instead, she was focused on the challenges any first year teacher goes through; such as talking with parents for the first time, or dealing with a discipline problem for the first time. She said she’s learned to exercise patience with herself and her students.

“I think the hardest part is giving myself grace and giving the kids grace. I think the hardest part was saying, ‘OK, what we just tried was terrible, we will retry it tomorrow.’ We have a mindset of ‘go, go, go!’...even though it was bad, push through to the next thing,” Waddell said. “But, giving myself time to say ‘OK that didn’t go well, let’s try again tomorrow,’ for me and also for the kids, because it shows them it’s okay to make mistakes and try something again.”

Now that Covid-19 restrictions have eased somewhat, Waddell said she and other first-year teachers are starting from step one in a way and learning how the school operates outside of a pandemic year. But, she said she has the support of her coworkers at Bigfork Elementary.

“Our staff is amazing at this school,” she said. “You get assigned a mentor your first year of teaching, but really every teacher here is like a mentor. You can walk into any classroom and ask a question about a student, or about material and they’ll help you,”

Waddell said she’s settling into life in Bigfork and loves the “small town feel.” She said she finds herself bumping into current and previous students more outside of class, and with one year of teaching under her belt, she said she’s finding more free time to get out into the community.

“It’s more full circle, it’s not just school and home life, it’s all mixed together,” she said.

Waddell said one of the most rewarding parts of her job is watching her students go from second-graders to fourth-graders.

“Just watching them grow as people, because we teach them math, and the writing, and the reading, but we also teach them how to be good students, good friends and good people,” she said. “Third grade is a pretty pivotal moment where they start realizing their place in the classroom, and really their place in society. So watching them choose to be kind and approach their teachers with respect...it’s really heartwarming to watch them be ready to go into fourth grade by the time they leave.”

Bigfork Eagle Editor Taylor Inman can be reached at editor@bigforkeagle.com