It took Amanda Cashman less than a week in front of a classroom to realize she’d found her niche.

It was January 2004, and Cashman had accepted a position at mid-year, teaching art at St. Aloysius High School, from which she had graduated just a few years before. Lisa Grant, her former art teacher, had had to leave the school after the first semester that year, and Cashman applied and got the job.

“Four days into it, I thought, yes, this is why I was put here. This is what I am meant to do,” Cashman said in a recent interview.

Her colleagues felt the same way. After just three years in the post, they voted her St. Al’s teacher of the year.

Now she has received statewide recognition, being awarded the Mississippi Art Education Association’s 2010 Elementary Division Outstanding Art Educator.

The award, presented to Cashman at the association’s fall conference in Jackson, recognizes exemplary teaching and commitment to art education.

“The reason it means so much to me is because it’s my mentors and my peers who think I am doing a good job and should be awarded for it,” said Cashman, 30.

Since that first semester at St. Al, Cashman has taught all levels. She spent 3 1/2 years at St. Al, gaining experience with fifth- through 12th-graders, and is currently in her second year teaching pre-kindergarten through sixth grade at St. Anthony Catholic School in Madison.

“She inspires the children,” said St. Anthony principal Angela Brunini. “She’s such a free spirit herself that the children are comfortable with her. She allows them to be different, to be themselves. She’s also just a complete expert in her field.”

In 2007, Cashman signed on as a volunteer at the Mississippi Museum of Art and, within a couple of months, was put on staff to head the museum’s education department. She continues to work there part time, leading tours, conducting workshops and teaching children’s summer art camps.

“We do a mix of sculpture, printing, painting, drawing — two- and three-dimensional works,” she said. “Some are tied to the collections and exhibitions at the museums, and of course we focus heavily on Mississippi artists.”

The daughter of The Vicksburg Post’s publisher, Louis P. “Pat” Cashman, and his wife, Barbara, Amanda Cashman grew up in Vicksburg and also attended St. Francis Xavier Elementary before St. Al.

She received a bachelor’s degree in studio art in 2002 from Millsaps College and, while teaching, has worked toward earning a master’s from Belhaven College.

“She’s a natural teacher,” Pat Cashman said. “She loves it and the kids love her. It suits her perfectly.”

When she was named St. Al’s teacher of the year, she said of her students, “I would like to be remembered as a teacher who taught them to see the world differently. I want them to look for flowers everywhere and to see them where others may not notice.”

That attention to detail was evident in her artwork even as a young child, Barbara Cashman said. “When she drew people, they had knees. She’d draw a room and there would be books on the shelves,” she said.

Amanda gets her artistic talent from both parents, her father’s family enjoying drawing and her mother’s quilting, needlework and stitchery. Barbara Cashman also taught for many years, at the college and secondary levels and as a substitute at St. Al and local public schools.

The publishing that’s in Amanda’s blood finds an outlet, too. She’s chairman and editor of the MAEA newsletter, which gets her a little ribbing from colleagues, she said.

She’s also on the association’s board of directors, and in her spare time sings in a country and western band called Hank Overkill.

But it’s her place at St. Anthony’s that makes her the happiest.

“It is truly where I am supposed to be,” she said. “Like I tell my mother, I hope I can work at St. Anthony’s until I get retired, fired or die.”