Tully: These Indy teachers truly do change lives
I long ago admitted to being a teacher groupie. Or, more specifically, a groupie of great teachers.
Give me a free work day and I’m happy to spend it sitting in a classroom somewhere, watching a wonderful teacher guide a class of students through subjects I sometimes (OK, often) don’t understand. The best ones can command a classrooms like a maestro, somehow capturing the collective attention of their students even as they allow students at different skill levels to operate at different paces.
It’s remarkable. It’s entertaining. It’s important. It’s inspiring.
And, so, nothing surprised me as I spent Wednesday morning reading through the nomination packets for the winners of this year’s Hubbard Life-Changing Teacher Awards. That’s not to say the tales in those packets weren’t touching and heroic. It’s just that I’ve grown quite used to hearing about the wondrous feats so often accomplished by teachers.
Great teachers.
I’m talking about people like Roslyn Stradford, one of the award winners this year.
Among those recommending the Shortridge Magnet High School teacher for the award was a colleague named Trenee Lambert — a colleague who was once Stradford’s student. It was Stradford, she said, who “mentored me through many of the obstacles I was going through,” who tutored her after school, pushed her to work hard, treated her like a daughter and guided her to college, helping her apply for scholarships and move into her dorm room.
“She is an incredible leader in and out of the classroom,” Lambert wrote.
Stradford was one of four winners of a prize local businessman Al Hubbard and his wife Kathy established two years ago to bring attention to the work being done by teachers in district and charter schools within the IPS district boundaries. (The winners take home $25,000.)
The Hubbards were inspired to create the awards after reading a paragraph in a column I wrote two years ago about an IPS senior who said one teacher had steered him away from the trouble he’d been heading toward. It was the kind of life-changing work that too often goes unnoticed, the Hubbards said.
It’s the type of work being done by teachers such as Donna Pope-Green of Northwest Community High School, another prize winner. Among the many glowing comments made about her, one came from Christopher Huffins, a former student who went on to compete in the Olympics. Huffins wrote that his former teacher, “is the only person who could have ever got me to like Geometry, simply by relating it directly to the long jump.” Away from the class, he said, his teacher guided “a brash young man who was often misunderstood” toward maturity.
Ann Marie Mennonno, who was also honored Wednesday, teaches first- and second-graders at the IPS Center for Inquiry. Perhaps nothing was more powerful in the stories contained in her packet than the reading scores of her elementary school students. At the start of the last school year, 73 percent of her students were reading below grade level; that figure was down to 5 percent at the end of the year.
At Broad Ripple High School, Doris Young was honored for 44 years of work as an English and humanities teacher. She wrote, “I have tried to cherish my students as well as teach them.”
It’s worked. Students wrote of how she has encouraged them to grab the opportunities available to them. Some told of the food she provides to students who don’t get enough at home. Many told of the extra work she does to help students excel in and out of class. One student wrote a testimonial that was so powerful it almost stopped me cold.
“She inspires me to grow not only in knowledge,” the student wrote, “but also in kindness, courage and humanity.”
Stradford, Pope-Green, Mennonno and Young each took home hard-earned awards Wednesday evening. They were deserving winners. And they are just four examples of the many teachers who walk into classrooms all across Indiana every school day and perform prize-worthy work.
You can reach me at matthew.tully@indystar.com or at Twitter.com/matthewltully