The 'Eagle Times' Student Newspaper

Mrs. (Smith) Backman helps students with an outdoor project. (Photo by Mary Beth Rader)

Former Silver Lake student strives to help children

By Erin Willet

September 07, 2001

Although many students have walked the hallways of Silver Lake High School, few of them return as teachers. However, Mrs. (Smith) Backman did just that, joining fellow faculty members and SLHS alumni such as Alan Cunningham, C.J. Hamilton, Brad Womack, and Rick Blush.

Backman graduated from SLHS in 1992 and then worked at Applebees while attending college at Emporia State University. There she majored in psychology and minored in music.

After graduating from college in 1999, she taught at Emporia High School for two years and then began teaching at the Topeka Juvenile Correctional Facility for three years. She taught in an inter-related classroom where she worked with mentally retarded students and those experiencing emotional disorders and learning disabilities.

She returned to Silver Lake this year to teach subjects including English, math and social sciences in the high school resource room.

“I thought I was going to be a music teacher, that’s what I went to college on a scholarship for, and I ended up not coming out with what I started with,” Backman said.

Backman explained why she likes helping students.

“I like working with people that have a desire to make themselves to be the best that they can be and it inspires you every day to be the best you can be…because you see them struggling with different issues that a lot of us take for granted,” Backman said.

Backman admired two of her junior high teachers when she was in school.

“My two favorite teachers were Mrs. Lewis and Mrs. Gilliland. I had a rough time with getting organized and some with math because I had gone to school in a different school during fourth grade when everyone else had learned these skills. They never gave up on me and always believed I'd get it,” Backman said.

She described why young people should pursue teaching.

“There’s always more information and teaching strategies and learning techniques that younger people can bring in that help us to become better teachers, and it helps us to be able to educate more kids instead of some kid falling through the cracks,” Backman said.

She shared that she was inspired to teach by her mother.

"I know after watching my mom be a para in the grade school, I knew it was something I wanted to do for me at a young age, but I didn’t know that I wanted to do the special ed. aspect of it,” Backman said.

Backman is planning on enrolling this summer to get her full-time master’s degree in special education, and when she is finished, she hopes to finish her psychology degree also.

She explained how it feels to be a teacher versus a student at Silver Lake.

“When you have these teachers here, they treat you like an adult because they expect things of you that you are going to be expected when you go out onto a job…so they give you adult expectations when you are in the classroom.

"...So to be here as a teacher, now, instead of being a student, people have treated me as a professional and it has been a really good transition because you know that you have a high quality of co-workers to work with,” Backman said.