Patricia “Patty” Messner never planned to be a teacher.
Before stepping into a classroom, she worked as a travel agent in Pennsylvania. But while volunteering to read to local children, a community member approached Messner, and said, “Please tell me you’re a teacher.”
Messner laughed and explained that she wasn’t. The woman happened to serve on an executive women’s council that was determined to see Messner become an educator. “They came back to me and they said, ‘We would like to offer you an early childhood degree. We will pay for everything. We will pay for your books. We will pay for your time at school,’” she said.
Messner received her associate’s degree in early childhood education. Shortly after, she began working in an after school science program where her passion for helping students was ignited.
“We were doing all kinds of experiments and I just had a field day. It was that ‘aha moment’ when one of the students there had a petri dish and he said ‘Miss, it’s growing. It’s growing,’” said Messner. “Seeing that wonder, I was just like, ‘Man, there’s something about this, that’s going to be a memory he will have for the rest of his life.’ And I was like, ‘I think I want to be a part of that.’”
That passion eventually led her to Arizona, where she began working in children’s services and Head Start programs. Messner earned her degree from Grand Canyon University. Although she initially taught in Douglas, the long commute and the sudden loss of her husband prompted her to seek a position that was smaller and closer to home. She found exactly what she was looking for in Pearce Elementary School, a small rural school where relationships matter as much as the academics.
“I knew I didn’t want to go to a large school. I knew that. I didn’t want to feel like I didn’t reach a student. That bothers me. I don’t feel like they get the best of me. If I want the best of them, they deserve the best of me,” said Messner. “I wanted to stay rural, and a place opened up here and this is where I’ve been ever since. I love it.“
Today, Messner teaches fifth through eighth grade language arts at Pearce Elementary, a pre-K through eighth-grade school of almost 150 students nestled among the mountains of southeastern Arizona.
Her classroom is one where every student is known, every voice matters, and every child is encouraged to take risks without fear of failure, something that she was encouraged by as well. “We ask our students to go out and try new things and push themselves. That’s what I ended up doing,” she said. “If somebody said, ‘What did you do before?’ The first thing I say is, ‘Oh, I think I was always a teacher,’ I was just trying to find my way to that point.”
A Classroom Where Students Can Be Themselves
For Messner, one of the greatest advantages of teaching in a rural school is the opportunity to truly know every student. With class sizes typically ranging from 10 to 15 students, she has time to understand each child’s strengths, struggles, dreams, and fears.
These smaller classes give her and her students the opportunity to take risks, become more comfortable with themselves, and learn the importance of respect and empathy amongst their peers. She encourages them to accept themselves rather than changing who they are to fit in.
In a middle school environment where students often struggle navigating new social pressures and trying to determine where they belong, Messner believes the classroom should be a place where students feel safe enough to ask questions, make mistakes, and to just simply be themselves with no inhibitions.
“I want them to know that when they come into this classroom, this is their second home,” she said. “They’ll get what they need here and they can just embrace what’s happening.”
This idea came from a deeply personal place for Messner. As a student herself, she remembers being called “stupid” by one of her teachers, and that moment has stayed with her into adulthood. “I don’t want my students to ever leave my classroom having memories like that,” she said. “If they have positive memories about their early education and their middle school education, they’re more willing to take those risks.”
For many of her students, that relationship develops over the four years they get to spend with her. Teaching students from fifth through eight grades allows Messner to watch them grow from children into young adults while learning their individual personalities, interests, and hopes for their futures.
“If I need to push a little more with this student, I can because I’ve built an environment in my classroom,” said Messner. “To me that is the truly positive moment that comes out of my classroom. I really get to know my students, not just as an academic student, but as a human being.”
That relationship often extends beyond the classroom, too. Former students and their families continue to return back to share their milestones and celebrations with Messner, sometimes even long after students have gone to college. “They come and share those celebrations because I’m part of their family. It’s a wonderful aspect of the teaching that they still see that connection with me,” she said.
Those types of connections are one of the many reasons that Messner believes teaching in a small rural school is so special.
Classrooms and Community
At Pearce Elementary School, learning does not always happen behind a desk. Being surrounded by their beautiful landscape of Arizona, Messner relished in the endless opportunities the students have to learn and explore in the real world, all while gaining a deeper appreciation for their community.
One example is the nearby Whitewater Draw Wildlife Area, a preserve and conservation area known for attracting thousands of migrating Sandhill Cranes. During one field trip, Messner’s students observed the cranes, took in their environment and considered the experience through the lens of language arts.
“It’s a pure pleasure to take my students to witness them coming in from their daily feedings and to watch the wonder on their faces when they hear the birds coming,” she said. “These birds are about four feet tall and it’s immense. They’re just watching with their wide eyes and they take it all in.”
While her students watched the birds fly in, they quickly learned that the experience was more than just a field trip. They were tasked with recording descriptive phrases and adjectives, with those collective items to later create a “solar quilt” incorporating poetry inspired by what they had seen, “I want that memory to be on paper in a creative fashion,” said Messner.
For Messner, this is the value of teaching in a rural community. Her students have different opportunities to engage in learning about science, writing, observation and creativity through an experience they get to see and hear themselves. The surrounding environment is not something students just pass on their way to schools, it can become an extension of the classroom.
“Learning happens every day that we get up. It’s a moment. I’m trying to take that moment and say, ‘Look around your beautiful community and see what you have,’” she said. “It drives me crazy when people think everything is just in a book.”
A walk though the community becomes a valuable lesson in observation. Students’ conversations become a lesson in communication. A visit to a wildlife preserve can become an opportunity to discuss conservation and what it means to be responsible for the land that students call home. Messner wants students to see that they are not separate from their community, but rather that they are what makes their community special.
The Rural Advantage
Messner does not view rural education through the lens of what students may lack. Instead, she encourages students to recognize all the wonderful opportunities that they have.
For Messner, being rural means having the opportunity to live life at a different, slower pace. It means having the time and space to notice the world around you and to appreciate the landscape, listen to the quiet surroundings and develop those meaningful relationships with the people in your community. This has been something that she has found to be profound since she was young.
“This goes back to when I was actually a city girl. When I was growing up, we would go to my grandma’s house, and she lived out in the country. I’ve always felt like the rural part of living has always been who I am,” said Messner. “Being rural means that we have the wonderful opportunity to see life at a different pace, where everybody’s forgetting to appreciate what’s around them because they’re just going.”
That perspective is one that Messner hopes to pass on to students. Too often, students may view their rural upbringing as a disadvantage compared to life in a larger city or community, but she encourages them to see it differently.
There is beauty in knowing your neighbors. There is value in having teachers who know your family. There is a sense of belonging that comes from growing up in a place where relationships are woven over time.
“We get to know each other. We have those opportunities to do that. For me, being rural isn’t a bad thing,” she said. “You have so many opportunities, and what a way to build a close-knit community with your family, with your school, and beyond.”
That sense of community is one of the greatest strengths of rural education. It is something that Messner believes students should recognize rather than overlook.
For her, the rural advantage is not just the quiet of the landscape or the beauty of the mountains. It is the opportunity to build relationships and to be a part of a community that sees students as more than a name on a roster.
Teaching the Whole Student
Messner finds it most important to teach students in a way that provides that well-rounded support, rather than just focusing on content itself. This is why Messner makes it a point to incorporate activities designed to help students slow down and rest. One technique she uses is neurographic drawing, an activity where students practice mindfulness and draw unplanned looping lines that allow students to quiet their minds and focus on the present.
In a world of constant digital stimulations, Messner believes mindfulness is becoming increasingly difficult for students, and adults, to practice. “It’s like a dwindling skill to just be able to be okay and be with yourself and do that self-talk that’s necessary for every individual,” she said.
The goal is to help students learn how to recognize what they need and to develop strategies to regulate themselves as they move through the world. This approach reflects a broader belief of Messner’s: students are people before they are test scores.
“I think for me as a teacher, I really am about the student as an individual, as a human being. Academics will come, all that’s just part of it,” she said.
If a student feels safe, supported, and confident, their success in other aspects of life will follow. “Helping them be the best human beings that they can be is a memory I want to leave for my students, when they think about me and they’re grown up,” she said.
That may mean helping a student find the confidence to speak in front of a group. It could mean teaching students how to listen respectfully. It may mean teaching students that being different is something to embrace. And sometimes, it’s just simply being the one adult who is consistently there in times of need.
That is also the advice that Messner offers to new teachers. She recognizes that universities can provide future educators with theory and the foundations of teaching, but she believes that the most important learning happens once a teacher steps into a classroom. Real-world teaching requires an open and flexible mind, and a willingness to learn from students and be confident in your authenticity.
“When you make this learning environment your own and inviting for your students and when they see you relaxed in your space, they will be relaxed in their space,” said Messner. “They will come in, they will make it their own. You are part of their family.”
Creating that environment also requires consistency. She emphasizes that trust is built in the small movements, like a private writing conference, a conversion, or a simple check-in. Those moments may seem insignificant from the outside, but to a student, they can make the difference between feeling like an outsider and feeling like a valued member of the classroom community.
“You have to remember to catch them. Kids remember those kinds of things and they’ll have a tendency to not come to you,” said Messner. “It’s those little moments that you create in your classroom to make your students feel like they’re part of this environment.”
Messner recognized that teachers cannot do this work alone. Administrative support, reliance, and a willingness to find alternative solutions are essential to success in the classroom. Looking back at her own career, she believes those lessons have shaped the teacher she is today.
“I wish somebody would have told me those things,” said Messner. “It’s crucial and it’s something that I’ve picked up as I’ve gone along. I think that’s what has made me the teacher I am.”
The Teacher Who Almost Didn’t Apply
Given the impact that Messner has had on her students, it may come as a surprise that she initially questions whether she should even apply for the award that would eventually recognize their work.
When Messner first learned she had been nominated for Arizona Rural Teacher of the Year, she assumed it was spam. It was her administrator, Susan, who encouraged her to take the nomination seriously and complete the application. Susan had told her, “We just think what you’re doing on the campus is just amazing. We always thought you were amazing.”
Messner decided to continue with the application and even found it as an opportunity to teach her students about the process of applying for professional recognition and advocating for your own work.
When Messner was named a Teacher of Distinction, she was surprised. When she was ultimately named Arizona’s Rural School Associations (ARSA) Rural Teacher of the Year, she was shocked.
“When I received my award, I saw it said ‘Teacher of the Year’. They called my name and that’s why I was double shocked,” she said. “When he called my name I flipped out because as a teacher you don’t always think about celebrating your positivity, your accomplishments.”
For someone who spends so much time encouraging students to recognize their own accomplishments, accepting recognition personally was not necessarily easy. But the award gave the school community an opportunity to do exactly that, to celebrate a teacher whose influence is visible not only in academic achievements, but in the confidence, compassion and curiosity students carry with her.
Perhaps that is the clearest reflection of Messner’s impact. She never set out to become Arizona’s Rural Teacher of the Year. She set out to create a classroom where students feel safe, supported and inspired to learn.
The award simply gave a name to what students, families and colleagues around Messner already knew.
