Henrico's Top Teachers – Alayna Tignor, Holman Middle School, family and consumer science

Each morning at the start of class, middle school teacher Alayna Tignor will play the “Affirmation Song” by Snoop Dogg and have her sixth and seventh grade students sing along.

“Today is going to be an amazing day!” the students recite, some reluctantly. “My feelings matter! I get better every single day! I choose to feel happy!”

Positive affirmations are a large part of Tignor’s “Teen Living” class at Holman Middle School, which resembles a home economics course where teens learn life skills like cooking, laundry, sewing, and budgeting. Middle school is an interesting age – often a tumultuous one – which makes practicing self-confidence so important for students, Tignor said, even if they are hesitant at first.

“My sixth graders are like, ‘I’m too cool for this,’ and I’m like, ‘No you’re not!’” she said. “I’m trying to make sure that they know that they’re the ones that set their limits, other people don’t. At the end of the day, it’s them.”

A lot of the content Tignor teaches is already pretty hands-on and engaging; students typically love the cooking and baking activities, and the chance to sew their own clothing and plushies. But even with the more basic, monotonous lessons – like identifying the different laundry symbols – Tignor finds a way to make them fun for her students.

“I try to make it more hands-on, more practical, and just make it more engaging for them,” she said, “It’s fun to be able to teach them like, here’s how you crack an egg, here’s what we do use a whisk for, here’s what we don’t. Because yeah. . . I forgot to go over that with one class and the whisks were just covered in sticky, sticky dough.”

Tignor actually didn’t start out as a FACS (Family and Consumer Sciences) teacher. After getting her master’s in education, she taught middle school history and government for 16 years. But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, she wanted to find a way to connect on a more personal level with her students and changed course to teach Teen Living.

“It’s weird that I started because I had this thirst to make sure that kids knew how our government was running, and now here I am just trying to make sure that they can be successful humans,” she said.

Tignor has been teaching at Holman since the doors to the school first opened in 2010. She does everything she can to make her students feel comfortable, hanging little cafe lights and plants from her ceiling over a couch and rug to make her classroom feel “homey.” Along with the Snoop Dogg song, she starts out everyday with a “mindful minute” of silence and the calming sounds of a Tibetan meditation bowl.

In addition to the affirmations and mindfulness, students do a lot of hands-on projects to build up their life skills. During their hand sewing unit, Tignor had students make stuffed whales and teddy bears that they could embellish and design. Even the students that weren’t big on sewing – mostly the boys – took pride in what they had made.

“The sewing with boys is always a big one, because they’re like, ‘Ugh, we’ve got to sew.’ And then at the end of the day they’re like, ‘Look I made a whale! This is so awesome!’” Tignor said. “It’s moments like that that make the days where I’m like dripping wet with sweat and just exhausted, wanting to fall on my couch, worth it. Because I know that that kid has really enjoyed what we did in class that day.”

Tignor feels that same joy when students give her homemade gifts and cards. When she was a history teacher, Teacher Appreciation Week would be full of gift cards that parents would send out. Now as an elective teacher, her students will sew her handmade presents or bake special cookies.

“It’s little things like that that let me know that what I’m doing has touched them and affected them, and that makes me feel good,” Tignor said. “They took their time, they thought about something I would want and appreciate, and they didn’t have to.”

The connections she forms with students are long lasting – many will come back years later, even from previous schools she taught at, to visit her and share all that they’ve accomplished, according to a colleague of Tignor's.

“No matter the topic, you feel her positive energy. You can see the excitement her students have when they enter her classroom,” the colleague wrote in a nomination. “She uses her extensive knowledge to connect to her students and build positive relationships throughout our building.”

High school and elementary school teachers may not believe it, but Tignor said that she is so grateful she gets to teach middle school, watching her students gain confidence and life skills and grow into who they want to be.

“I love middle school. I never in a million years thought that I would ever say that,” she said. “I don’t think that I really understood how much I was going to enjoy my job.”