While Mrs. Tami Marion is an accounting teacher at Ballard High School, there’s likely a lot that you don’t know about her. One interesting detail that is specific to her profession is that she originally studied to become a CPA, rather than an accountant. During a recent interview, she said “I wanted to be a CPA. I wanted to have my own accounting profession or my own accounting business. When I transferred to UofL from JCTC, I got into a sorority and kind of got swayed a little bit, I guess by my sorority sisters, to do marketing.” After that, she switched her major from accounting to marketing and graduated with her bachelor’s degree in marketing.
Mrs. Marion has been teaching for 25 total years. She originally started teaching at Doss High School. She stayed there for 15 years before moving on to Ballard. She stated the reason she left Doss was for a “change of scenery” and that it was a school that she would love to be at. She said that she didn’t even think there would be an opening when she put in an application, but in the summer of the same year, a job became available so she got the job.
Believe it or not, being a teacher can be a very time consuming profession. Like any other teacher, Mrs. Marion can find it challenging at times to balance her work life with her personal life around her family and pets. She discussed how when she was at Doss, she started to find herself planning her lessons and curriculum at home, and also thinking of different ways. Like many other things, she credits work experience with helping her learn to sit back and figure out what’s really important.
Along with teaching accounting to juniors and seniors, Mrs. Marion runs the bookstore here at Ballard. She is in charge of all in-person merchandise purchases at the school. When she took the job at Ballard, Dr. Nuess offered up the bookstore position to her, and she accepted it. Over the past five years, she’s taken a lot of time to remodel it to resemble a college bookstore.
For another addition to this feature, we reached out to current Ballard senior Zeke House to get some input on Mrs. Marion’s class and how she teaches. When asked about his time in her class, Zeke said “I thoroughly enjoyed her class, Mrs. Marion’s accounting class as a whole throughout the entire year. She had taught me various lessons on how to be financially responsible in general, other than just money.” In her class, Zeke also mentioned how she showed videos of how businesses operate behind the scenes, and how that helped him understand how a business truly functions. Overall, he raved about Mrs. Marion’s class and had nothing negative to say.