FUTURE IN TEACHING GAUGED
As a seventh-grader in Ann Toner’s class at Thornburg Middle School, Rebecca Sheets always asked a lot of questions.
She was a teacher-pleaser, says Toner.
These days, Sheets is back in the classroom with Toner, and she’s still asking questions.
But now, the 18-year-old senior at Massaponax High School in Spotsylvania County is the one leading the lesson.
Sheets is a teacher cadet in Teachers for Tomorrow, a statewide program that is also in use in Stafford County.
Spotsylvania launched the program in 2006 for high school juniors and seniors. There are about 40 students participating from four of the county’s five high schools.
Spotsylvania schools’ Human Resources Director Eric Cunningham said the program aims to capture “the best and the brightest” high school students to consider a teaching career.
“It elevates the prestige of becoming an educator, and it creates ambassadors,” he said.
Students and teachers say the program is rigorous.
In the first half of the yearlong course, cadets learn about teaching styles, the different ways children develop and barriers to learning. In the last nine weeks, they apply what they’ve learned to the elementary and middle school classrooms of their teacher–mentors.
They construct lesson plans, grade papers and build portfolios at the end of the year.
“It’s time-consuming,” said Ann Tinsman, a librarian at Massaponax, who is in charge of the program there. “I’ve worked more this year” than before.
She’s been teaching for 35 years.
A REALITY CHECK
Madeline Hanes, a 17-year-old senior at Massaponax, says she’s 90 percent sure she’ll be a teacher.
The program was a reality check.
“I think everyone has this glorified notion they’ll be able to take the education profession by storm,” Hanes said minutes before her sixth-graders filed into the room. Like Sheets, Hanes chose Thornburg Middle School as her teaching site.
Some students resist being taught, she said. Some are slower to learn than others.
But Hanes, who admits she wasn’t always a stellar student, said maybe she can motivate low-achievers, too.
“To see somebody who wasn’t motivated in school could be helpful for the good student and the poor student,” she said.
One teacher cadet found success in her seventh-grade English class at Thornburg.
Megan Sessamen, 18, managed to coax a student to do his homework. Before she came to the classroom, he never turned in assignments to his teacher, Kim Allen.
From talking to him, Sessamen learned he felt more comfortable around her because they were closer in age. She told him the only reason Allen couldn’t reach him was because he wouldn’t let her.
“So he said he’s going to try to get better,” Sessamen said.
TEACHER SHORTAGE
If cadets decide not to go into education, at least they will have an insight into what it takes to teach, Cunningham said.
“When a student understands the rigor that’s involved in becoming a teacher, they then begin to appreciate the profession,” he said.
But administrators hope the school division also will benefit from the program. Teachers for Tomorrow fosters “homegrown” teachers.
“Because of the critical shortage of teachers in many areas across the nation, we now need to grow our own,” Cunningham said.
Math, science and special-education teachers are particularly hard to find.
With veteran teachers of the baby boomer generation nearing retirement, Cunningham said, it’s critical for them to share their knowledge with younger teachers.
‘I CAN DO THAT’
Which two figures always have four congruent sides?
The Problem of the Day in Sheets’ class didn’t stump the seventh-graders.
A, they said. The rhombus and the square.
Toner watched her protégée conduct the class, rarely interrupting the lesson. The students listened to “Ms. Sheets,” who appeared as if she had been on the job for years.
Having nine nieces and nephews to baby-sit, with some of them needing help learning numbers, cemented her dream, Sheets said.
In the eighth grade, she wrote Toner a letter saying she wanted to be just like her, a math teacher.
The workload was “above and beyond” her expectations, Sheets said, and now she respects teachers even more.
“I’m up for the challenge,” Sheets said. “I can’t wait to prove that I can do that, too.”
>>>The Virginia Department of Education borrowed the Teachers for Tomorrow concept from South Carolina; similar programs have also been spawned in other states.
In the current school year, 115 of 320 high schools in Virginia run Teachers for Tomorrow, according to the Virginia Department of Education. It can be found in 55 of the 135 school divisions.