Wanda Evans

Q & A on retirement with Wanda Evans

How many years have you been teaching total? at Tunstall? What subject/grade levels?

I taught at McMichael High School for 3 years before coming to Tunstall High School in 1996. I have been at Tunstall for 15 years. My first 3 years at Tunstall, I taught at the Middle School for ½ day and the high school for ½ year. I have always taught art.

What made you decide to become a teacher? 

I have always loved and been involved in art. I have taught adult classes and I ran a craft store for a while so deciding what I wanted to do when I went back to college was an easy decision.

What are you most looking forward to about retirement?

Being able to spend more time with my family, traveling and creating art for my own enjoyment.

How did you know that now was the right time to retire?

There are so many things I’d like to do creatively and I’d like to explore some of those outlets. 

What will you miss about Tunstall? 

There is no doubt that I will miss Tunstall. I’ll miss teaching, seeing the students grow more creative as they take higher levels of art and I will miss all the good friends that I’ve made here.

What would you say to someone who wants to be a teacher? 

I always heard that “Teaching is a calling”, and I thought that’s just something people say, but it is true. Teaching is not glamorous. Teaching will not make you rich. Teaching is hard and at times very stressful but here at the end of my career I must say that there is no other feeling to match the light in a student’s eyes when they succeed at a task they struggled with and thought they couldn’t do. There’s nothing else that quite matches that.