Amber Middlemiss

I was born and raised in the Upper Peninsula and moved to Green Bay, Wisconsin when I was fourteen. After graduating high school, I enrolled in Green Bay's community college and worked as a teller at a local bank. In 2009, I got married and moved to Grand Rapids, MI with my husband, Isaac. I continued my banking career at Comerica Bank and enrolled at GRCC. I earned my Associate of Arts degree in 2012. Afterward, I decided to take time off school to focus on my banking career.

Comerica Bank encouraged its employees to become active members of their communities by doing regular volunteer work. For a few years, I volunteered at random places such as food donation warehouses and local festivals. However, everything changed when I began to take on educational volunteer opportunities.

In 2011, I began volunteering as a reading coach through United Way Schools of Hope at Buchanan Elementary in Grand Rapids. I worked one-on-one with 1st-grade students to help improve their phonemic awareness. After working with United Way for a while, I began to search for other ways that I could get involved in education. In 2014, I became a finance and community involvement teacher through Junior Achievement of West Michigan. My first teaching assignment was in a 2nd-grade class at Parkview Elementary in Wyoming, MI. After the first lesson, I immediately fell in love with teaching and knew that I wanted to change careers.

In 2016, I decided to kickstart my passion for teaching children by spending the summer as a volunteer at the Cure International Children's Hospital in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. On this trip, my team and I cared for the children as they came out of surgery and helped to run mobile orthopedic clinics in surrounding areas. In the fall of 2016, I went back to school for a bachelor's degree in elementary education at the Grand Rapids campus of Ferris State University.

During my junior and senior years of college, I worked at two different schools for my pre-student teaching and student teaching placements. During my pre-student teaching, I worked in a 2nd/3rd-grade split class at Aberdeen Elementary in Grand Rapids, MI. My student teaching placement was in a kindergarten class at West Elementary in Wyoming, MI. I graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in December 2018.
After graduating, I stayed on at West Elementary as a 4th-grade long-term substitute teacher for the remainder of the 2018-2019 school year. Now, I have the privilege of returning to West Elementary for the 2019-2020 school year as a kindergarten teacher!
I currently live in Grand Rapids, MI with my husband and two cats, Kip and Reginald. I can't wait to teach kindergarten! I was born and raised in the Upper Peninsula and moved to Green Bay, Wisconsin when I was fourteen. After graduating high school, I enrolled in Green Bay's community college... read more