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Future in teaching gauged
With school divisions short of teachers in critical areas, many have decided to 'home grow' their own. Spotsylvania County is one of several in the state that have adopted Teachers for Tomorrow
BY KAREN BOLIPATA
Date published: 5/12/2008
BY KAREN BOLIPATA
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.
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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.
ONLINE: To read more about the program, visit the Department of Education Web site at doe.virginia.gov/VDOE/Instruction/CTE/cc/VTFT
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Date published: 5/12/2008
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