Photo by Anna Cate Peeples.
Amy Rainer with students in her etiquette classes.
Amy Rainer still talks about the young boy who knocked on the door of her Crestline home more than 15 years ago. His name was Allen Corey and he was there to welcome Rainer to the neighborhood. Rainer had recently moved from Atlanta, Georgia, and was about to begin her first year teaching at Crestline Elementary.
Rainer said she was nervous about her first day. Though she had already taught for several years in Atlanta, the first-day butterflies were already fluttering.
Corey helped ease her fears.
“I can still see him today,” she said. “He had blond hair and tan skin. He was wearing a red golf shirt tucked into his khaki pants.”
It was Corey’s confidence more than anything, said Rainer, that stood out to her.
“He locked eyes with me, extended out his hand to me and said ‘I’m Allen Corey and I’m excited to be in your second-grade class.”’
It’s that same confidence and poise Rainer hoped to inspire in the hundreds of children she worked with in her 20-year career as a teacher and her 15-year career as an etiquette teacher.
Rainer said she knew early on she could intertwine her love for teaching with her etiquette knowledge.
“I come from a long line of teachers,” said Rainer. “I had always wanted to be a teacher.”
The attraction began years ago, she said, when she would stand on top of tables and gather all the neighborhood children around her for a lesson.
It was while she was a kindergarten teacher in Atlanta that Rainer said she was first inspired to teach her students a thing or two about table manners. As they all sat around the lunchroom table eating family-style, Rainer joked that in order to be able to enjoy lunches for the rest of the year, she had to try and insert some order. She began with little lessons around the table.
“I knew the things I was teaching the kids were things their parents had already talked to them about,” said Rainer, “but sometimes it helps to hear it from someone else.”
When Thanksgiving rolled around, Rainer held “Turkey Tea Parties” during lunchtime with six students at a time. Her teaching assistant would take the rest of the kids to the lunchroom, while Rainer hosted the smaller group.
When she moved on to second grade, Rainer would arrange group dinner outings with her students, where she would focus on proper dinner techniques in public.
“There’s also a certain sticking power to these lessons when the students are taught among their peers,” she said.
After moving to Birmingham 17 years ago to be closer to the Auburn friends she met while attending the university, Rainer said she began teaching etiquette classes to her third-grade female students at Crestline Elementary after one of the moms asked if she had any experience with character education or etiquette classes.
Once again recognizing a need among her students, Rainer quickly developed a curriculum.
Each year, parents knew that when their girls entered the third grade, they too would be privy to Rainer’s etiquette lessons.
“Every year, the boys’ moms would ask me to develop a class for their sons,” she said.
Now that she is retired from teaching, Rainer said she finally had the proper amount of time to devote to having both a boy’s and girl’s etiquette class. Rainer now works out of the home she shares with her husband and three teenagers, teaching a variety of etiquette classes to boys and girls in grades 3-12. Her etiquette class company, Cultivate 312, is structured around Colossians 3:12: “…dress in the wardrobe God picked out for you: compassion, kindness, humility, quiet strength, discipline. Be even-tempered and content with second place. Be quick to forgive an offense. And regardless of what else you put on, wear love. Never be without it.”
Rainer said while it is important to teach children how to act in social situations, she believes nothing can replace being kind, compassionate and gentle.
“If we know all the rules of etiquette but don’t practice kindness,” said Rainer, “what does that make us?”
Along with teaching her students about how to properly set a table, when a gentleman should stand in the presence of a lady and how to properly set down a fork, Rainer shares lessons on personal appearance, self-confidence, first impressions, healthy eating habits, communication skills and, of course, cellphone manners.
“Technology has given us many wonderful things,” said Rainer, “especially inside a classroom. But it has also caused new areas of concern.”
Even among grownups, Rainer said she has noticed a marked difference in how people will interact with each other in public settings because of technology.
“It’s much easier for moms and dads to pull out their cellphones at soccer practice than go over and start a conversation with another parent,” said Rainer.
It’s an effect she sees trickle all the way down to the children.
“Children are not in the same place with their conversation competency today than when I first started teaching,” she said. “Screens can distract us all from having to have real conversations with each other, give each other eye contact and make each other feel important in a conversation.”
For that reason, Rainer makes it a practice to encourage the older girls who attend her etiquette classes to place their cellphones face down in the middle of her kitchen island when they walk in the door.
“It’s a little strange for them the first time,” she said with a laugh, “but becomes standard practice after a little while.”
One of the most rewarding things, said Rainer, is when she sees her former students practicing what she has taught them, not only about how to properly set a table, but about how to speak clearly and confidently to adults, how to care about each other and be proud of themselves.
“I loved watching the children practice the techniques among themselves,” she said, “when they thought no one was looking. I’m blessed to see it each day I am in the community.”
Still, Rainer said she’d like to make one thing perfectly clear.
“These lessons work on the teacher too,” she said. “I have not mastered all of this, either. We are all works in progress.”
Registration for a series of mini-classes Rainer will teach in August — just in time for the new school year on first impressions and conversation skills — is currently open online. A special “Self-Confidence and Body Image” session for rising seventh-grade girls will also be offered the evening before Spartan Day. This session includes a mini boot camp led by Every Girl Fitness trainers.
“I’d like to give these kids all types of tools for their toolbox,” she said, “to help prepare them for whatever may come their way.”
For more information, visit cultivate312.com or mannersinmountainbrook.com.
