Hollie Greenwood is a second-grade teacher at Cypress Cove Elementary. (Special to the American Press)

When life gave Hollie Greenwood lemons, she gladly made a batch of lemonade with them.

“Sometimes bad things happen and it’s our job to find the good in those situations,” Greenwood tells her second-graders at Cypress Cove Elementary.

Greenwood has been an educator at the school for nine years — two years in second grade and seven as a fifth-grade teacher — and she speaks from experience.

“My husband has a job that he loves every single day and I was working at a job that I dreaded going to so we talked about it and I felt like teaching was something I always wanted to do,” she said.

Still a newlywed, Greenwood chose to quit her job and earn her teaching degree.

“I’ve always loved working with little kids and I taught Sunday school at my church so I felt teaching would be the right fit for me,” she said.

Greenwood admits her teaching style is a bit like “organized chaos.”

“I’m not a Type A where everything has its place,” she said with a laugh. “Things are going to get wild, it might get crazy, it will probably be messy, but we’re all going to have fun.”

Her favorite subject to teach her young scholars is social studies.

“I’m a big ol’ history nerd,” she said. “A lot of our units in reading have a form of history within them so we study about people from the past and give the kids little tidbits about how things worked back then. We’re not going full-blown Civil War in our lessons, but the kids get just enough to have these little ‘aha’ moments that I love to watch happen.”

It’s those light bulb moments that are her favorite part of the day.

“In second grade we see little struggling readers who finally are able to get it and then the look on their faces when they realize they’ve done it, it’s priceless.”

Being her students’ cheerleader is something she learned from her own favorite childhood teacher.

“It’s Mrs. Morgan, my fifth-grade teacher at E.K. Key Elementary,” she said. “I felt like she truly cared. I know all my teachers cared about me but I feel like she went the extra mile to show me she cared. She truly cared about how I did and how I progressed.”

She said the world needs more teachers like Mrs. Morgan because this is the profession that molds the next generation of professionals.

“Teachers create all the jobs,” she said from her lemon-themed classroom. “It’s our job to get these little ones ready.”