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Teacher Spotlight: Mrs. Melody Dickerson, FACS Teacher

April 11, 2023

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📰Our PCHS Journalism Class has been working on interview skills by interviewing teachers. Check out their next Teacher Spotlight, Mrs. Melody Dickerson, FACS (Family and Consumer Science) Teacher.

👩‍🍳👨‍🍳Mrs. Dickerson teaches and coaches at PC. The classes she teaches are Career Development, Nutrition and Wellness, Child Development, and Apparel and Textiles. She enjoys teaching things that she believes are important to know how to do. She is hoping her students will remember them as adults.

🧷It helps that she loves cooking and sewing. Mrs. Dickerson would describe herself as fun and fair and hopes that her classes are enjoyable. Mrs. Dickerson revealed to us that her favorite class to teach is Nutrition and Wellness, even though it is this class that she finds the hardest to teach. Students in cooking class sometimes ask questions like ‘Do we really need to use this ingredient’ or ‘Is it okay to use a teaspoon instead of a big spoon’.


💙We asked Mrs. Dickerson about her worst memory as a teacher, to which she replied that there was not really one in particular but she just hates when students get hurt, like the time around last year when a student got hurt with a glue gun. In opposition, her best memories are the ones when she sees her students doing well. We tried to figure out which student was her favorite but unfortunately, the best answer we got was that she loves the senior class.👩‍🎓👨‍🎓

💙Mrs. Dickerson is a multi-task master of a teacher with the various lessons she is teaching. She was, for instance, a science teacher in the past too and if she had to teach another class she would go back to that. One piece of advice she has for future teachers: “Be patient and understand that every student is different.”

Mrs. Dickerson grew up on a dairy farm south of Kansas City. She has 3 younger sisters. She attended K-12th grade in Harrisonville, MO as a Wildcat. She was involved in many clubs and played sports year-round.
After graduation, she went to Northwest Missouri State. During her first 2 years there, her major was Zoology, then she found that she was missing the farm, so she changed her major to Animal Science. During college, she spent a summer as an intern at Mount Vernon- George Washington's home in Alexandria, VA, and she spent a summer as a nanny in Stuttgart, Germany.

Also while at college, she met her husband Josh. He brought her to the very small town of Lucerne! They got married in 2002 and she started working for his dad at a farm supply store in Lucerne. And yes, she tells us she had a big city shopping withdrawal for about a year after moving up here. They have 3 children- Adeline, Gretchen, and Charley.

In 2017 she started substituting at Putnam County R-I Schools. In 2018, she worked as a teacher's assistant in the Title I Reading department at Putnam County Elementary. After working on her teaching certification, she stepped into a new role teaching middle and high school science. When the opportunity came available to switch to FACS, she jumped at it and we are so glad she did. She tells us, "I am very honored to get to teach in such a wonderful community!"

When Mrs. Dickerson isn't in the FACS classroom, you can find her coaching girls' track and assistant coaching in girls' basketball. Her
hobbies include spending time with her family, reading, gardening, and spending time outdoors. She has a couple of milk cows, chickens, a pig, and lots of other fun farm animals!

Thanks for all you do, Mrs. Dickerson! We are #PutnamProud of you!