For his first couple of years, Joseph Underwood was an athletic trainer who also happened to teach. And it showed. Like the day he was too sick to come to class but still showed up for the evening’s basketball game.
“My principal saw me and asked ‘What are you doing here?’” said Underwood, now a Florida inductee to the National Teachers Hall of Fame. “I said, ‘There’s a game.’ He said ‘Your priorities are all screwed up.’”
Some time later, Underwood came to agree. His assistant trainers were doing OK but not spectacular. But the students in his broadcast class were getting internships and scholarships left and right — and he’d barely been noticing.
“I thought, my priorities are all screwed up,” Underwood said.
Not anymore. Underwood joins four other teachers today in the National Teachers Hall of Fame — Norman Conard of Uniontown, Edna Rogers of Tennessee, Geri Rohlff of Washington State and John Snyder of Nevada.
The new inductees spent Friday morning in interviews and roundtables, discussing the state of teaching and some of their own experiences. Some had wanted to teach since childhood, such as Rohlff, who would line up her dolls into a “class” and tell Chatty Cathy not to talk to her neighbor.
Rogers, on the other hand, had never expected to teach. She wound up in the profession during a teacher shortage and spent 12 years running a classroom without a degree. Her first day, she watched as the kids ran wild in a neighboring teacher’s class.
“As I watched them, I thought ‘They are not going to take advantage of me,’” Rogers said. That determination eventually crystallized into a love of the profession — particularly when she landed in a kindergarten class.
“I had never liked my name Edna,” she said. “And when my little kindergarten student called me “Miss Edna,” I knew that was the name I was meant to have.”
All five have a gift, not just for firing enthusiasm, but for teaching respect. It has to be taught early, Rogers said, and too often isn’t taught by anyone else.
Snyder, who teaches computer science at a Las Vegas magnet school, likes to pull out a quote from “Harvey’s” Elwood P. Dowd: “In this life, you must be oh-so-smart or oh-so-pleasant. I’ve tried smart. I prefer pleasant.”
“I tell my kids ‘Everyone in here can get by with being smart, but it’s not the smart people that get ahead,’” Snyder said. “It’s the kind people that get ahead.”
Rohlff has had to deal with both ends: she teaches college-level writing at her high school but also teaches alternative education, helping the kids that have fallen down elsewhere. It’s a task that continues to fire her enthusiasm.
“They’re like Swiss cheese — you have to fill in the holes,” she said. “But when those kids walk across that stage and you know how hard they’ve worked to get to that goal, you start to think ‘OK, I can’t wait to get to next year!’”
That enthusiasm can be hard to keep going in others, though. During the morning panel, moderator Keith Geiger noted that many teachers leave the profession inside of five years. How, he asked, would the Hall of Famers re-light that fire in a colleague?
“What I try to do is make things fun for me, not just my kids,” Underwood said. “And I let them do all the work. Maybe that’s why teachers burn out. The kids should be the ones working hard — the teacher’s just there to keep them on the right path.”
Others suggested a mentor, or taking the time to get your feet under you. Of course, some teachers do have a few advantages.
“My colleagues in my building like to tease me that the best career move I made was marrying someone who works in mental health,” Conard joked.
Several of the panel questions dealt with accountability and especially No Child Left Behind, the federal education standards that are up for renewal this year. Every teacher agreed that accountability was important — “To oppose accountability would be like opposing motherhood and apple pie,” Conard quipped — but that national standards and state standards needed to be in line with each other, and that all the standards had to be able to account for individual situations and improvements rather than be “one size fits all.”
“If I have a student who comes in reading at third grade level and comes out reading at fifth grade level, I think I should be recognized for doing a good job,” Rohlff said.
And sometimes, she added, the sheer number of tests can be overwhelming. Washington students take eight consecutive days of state standardized tests, she said, for three hours a day.
“It’s too much testing,” Rohlff said. “Way too much testing.”