By Abagale Elliott
Since the start of school, the sixth grade middle school students have had a part of their day that felt familiar and maybe even helped them adjust: Nick Roby, their gym teacher. Roby is the new gym teacher at SMS, but he has worked for SCS for five years.
Roby was a special education aide at Georgetown Elementary and it was there that he found his love for teaching.
“I can thank the admin and teachers [at Georgetown Elementary] for pushing me to obtain my teaching license,” he said. He has now been teaching for nine years.
At Bradie Shrum Elementary, Roby was a kindergarten teacher and then gym teacher. Making the switch from teaching different groups of children that are in the age range of 5-12 years once a week to teaching groups of children aged 12-14 every day for weeks at a time can be hard. Just switching from having a small group of students to a big group of students could be rough. Roby said there was no one thing that made the decision to switch up his daily life easy.
“I don't really have a final factor that necessarily swayed me to switch, but the opportunity was presented to me and I just decided to go for it!” he said. “Now I will say the timing wasn't truly ideal, but we are making it work!”
While the timing wasn’t ideal, the middle school needed a new teacher, and Roby stepped up to the opportunity. Roby has replaced Dwayne Malloy who is now the dean of students at the middle school.
He is definitely making his situation work based upon the things his students say about him. When sixth grade student Katie Spaulding was asked what it was like to have a familiar face on her first day in middle school, she said, “It was comforting because he is really nice and funny and he has a good sense of humor.”
Seana Elliott, also a sixth grader, said, “He is really funny.”
It seems that these sixth graders are thankful for Roby following them into middle school. He was a friendly face on the first day of school for these girls. A funny person is the kind of person who can get kids involved and focused, especially when in a competitive environment like middle school gym class.
“In elementary school, we are focused on developing the foundational motor skills,” said Roby. This will hopefully help them get interested in joining sports or just even be physically active! In middle school, the students are finding out what sports they are interested in. With this, they are very competitive in P.E. class, which is fun to be a part of. So any sport or game we play is very competitive!”
With this being said, just based upon the needs of the students, it seems like Roby is a great fit for his new role at SMS.