If there was a moment that Alea Murphy knew for certain she would work with young children as a vocation, it was in 2005, when a struggling seventh-grader at Pimlico Middle School finally got it.
The student had been unable to grasp a math concept. Murphy, working as a mentor in the University of Maryland's America Counts after-school program, tried repeatedly to explain. They achieved the breakthrough together.
"I went about it a different way and he understood it," said Murphy, who is a hurdler for Towson University when she isn't working with kids. "It was like an epiphany. It made me feel so worthy as a person, and grateful that somebody else understood what I was thinking."
Indeed, what made the moment profound was that Murphy had been in that boy's seat once. Not with math concepts, but with reading. Not as a seventh-grader, but as a first-grader.
Criticized by a teacher for reading too slowly, she came to hate books and reading. She considered it a waste of time even into her teen years. Now, however, she has come full circle.
Murphy, 21, is a junior at Towson with a dual major in early childhood education and elementary education. She has a partial scholarship on the track and field team. But here's the real kicker:
Today, the young woman from Clarks Summit, Pa. -- who once would rather have done anything than read -- is self-publishing a children's book titled Learning with Lilly.
Its 16 pages are filled with illustrations and insight into the decision-making process of children, and the mistakes that sometimes accompany the process. The book was the result of a course assignment at Towson.
A version of Learning with Lilly recently reached St. Mary of Mount Carmel in Dunmore, Pa. First-grade teacher Amy Shafer gave it a strong endorsement.
"I thought it was a great book," Shafer said. "It talked about the decisions Lilly [a frog] went through, [deciding] right from wrong. It also asked the students different questions, and that opened up the class to a discussion about what she should do. And the illustrations [Murphy's own] were great."
It isn't something Murphy's mother could have expected when her daughter started school.
"Alea had a very bad experience with her first-grade teacher," Sandy Murphy said. "The woman turned her off completely to anything that had to do with school. There were lots of insults and degrading comments in the classroom specifically to her."
