By CRISTINA JANNEY
Hays Post

Pam Dreiling loves to laugh. She loves laughter in her classroom, and her peers often say she is as silly as the 3- and 4-year-olds she teaches.

“I am not afraid to show them that I have made a mistake or do something silly,” she said.

The kids help Dreiling in a constant comic hunt for her glasses. They tell jokes and funny stories.

“There is a lot of laughter in my classroom,” she said. “We try to have a lot of fun, but it is never laughing at anyone. It is laughing together. We try to have a lot of fun. If I can’t have fun with my kids, I don’t want to be doing this.”

Dreiling, 50, has been teaching for 25 years and is January’s Hays Post Teacher of the Month. She is in her 11th year of teaching Head Start preschool for Early Childhood Connections and is currently based in an Ellis classroom.

Makenzie Henman said in her nomination, “Pam is so compassionate about her job. She goes the extra mile to make sure that children are learning, and she really builds a bond with the kids. She is an amazing teacher and it is hard to find teachers like her these days!”

Tammy Wellbrock, Dreiling’s sister, said, “Pam is truly a walking hug and children love her. The student population she serves is in a lower-income bracket and many of the students are from broken homes or involved in complicated domestic situations. Pam is the perfect person to provide them a safe, nurturing, encouraging classroom while also meeting their academic needs.”

Dreiling is Tia Miller’s former teacher, and she said in her nomination, “Pam is the most outgoing, loving, dedicated teacher I have ever met. She taught me when I was 5, and I am now 21 and still keep in touch with her. If that doesn’t say something as a teacher, I don’t know what does. She’s amazing!”

Dreiling has spent most of her career teaching 3- to 6-year-olds and said she really enjoys helping younger children discover their world.

“I really like when they are excited about learning something — when they are excited and you can just see it in their faces, ‘Whoa I get that! That’s cool!’ — that discovery by them. They discover something, and they are interested, and it piques their interest, and they want to learn more,” she said. “(I like) when it is just starting to all come together.”

When Dreiling was in high school, she swore she would never be a teacher. She tried teaching Bible school in the summer, but she became frustrated when the children acted up.

However, Dreiling found teaching was a calling she couldn’t escape.

“It was almost if I always knew I should be a teacher,” she said. “My mom has always compared me to my grandma in my personality. It was just what God wanted me to do. You know you were just born to do something. I know that is where my heart lies.”

Her grandmother Helena Duus was a teacher for 29 years in the Sylvan Grove area and was quite strict. Dreiling said she was ornery as a kid, and to some extent still is. Grandma Helena never let her get away with the same things her other grandparents did.

However, she said she still sees ways in which she and her grandmother are similar.

“God puts us on this earth and has a plan for us,” she said. “and I think my grandma knew that being a teacher was also the plan God had for her, and I think that was true for me. It is not a job as I look at just being a job. I take it very seriously. I am forming the future of these children or helping them to form their future, so I can’t let them down. I can’t just go clock in. There is a lot at stake. Their little lives are at stake. I take that very seriously.”

Even though Dreiling works with the smaller children, she stops in the hall and gives the older children hugs. She said she has always has been drawn to the underdog and seeks out those children who need a little extra attention and encouragement.

Dreiling enjoys her breaks and off times, but even then, she seems to be drawn to children. She has three children of her own and one grandchild.

“At this point in my life, it is sometimes hard to differentiate between being a teacher and being a mom,” she said, “and now that I am getting older, it is being a grandma. Sometimes I feel like I am a mom to the parents. A lot of the parents are around my daughter’s age. I feel like a mom to them and a grandma to the little ones.”

If there is anything she would like to impart to those parents, it is you don’t have to do elaborate and exciting things with your kids. Just read to them, talk to them and help them discover and help them to grow.

“If they do those things as a rule, love their kids, then they will do just fine in school,” she said.

Dreiling said her classroom runs like a family with family values.

“We all have importance,” she said. “We all have a job. If someone is missing for the day because they are sick, we wish them well. We try to develop a family because families have each other’s backs, and that is what I am trying to teach the kids is to have each other’s backs, to be friends, to use kind words.”

One of the best things Dreiling said she has done in her classroom is ask the children if they want a toy to tap the other child on the shoulder and ask for it. It seems simple, but Dreiling said it has been amazing how well the technique has worked.

Learning to get along with others is the most important skill children learn in preschool, she said. The second is teaching children to self-regulate their emotions.

Dreiling still gets frustrated when the children act out, just like she did when she was a teenagers, but she has found taking care of herself by getting enough sleep and deep breathing helps her get through rough spots.

She teaches the children the same deep breathing exercises to help them deal with their own frustrations. It is part of ECC’s conscience discipline program. She puts the smaller children in her lap and exaggerates her own breathing so she is breathing with them. She said she wishes she would have known these techniques when she was a young mother because she would have used them.

“It is really pretty amazing when a child is really upset, and you start breathing with them,” she said. “Of course, they fight you at first. They don’t want to do it because they are mad. When you finally get them to breathing, it is as if their eyes soften and you can tell they are back to rational thinking again. It really is pretty amazing.”

After 25 years, Dreiling said she has good days and bad days. She doesn’t look to retire any time soon, put looks forward to a time when she can spend more time on herself.

“If I start getting down, I will have a good day, and it sucks me back in,” she said. “Those good days are like a drug.”

She described a good day.

“No big behavior problems, and a day where we laughed. We got our work done. The lessons went well. People were listening. Children were engaged. That is a good day for me, and there is laughter. There’s got to be laughter. I do not want to work in a place where there is not laughter because, again, I am kind of ornery.”