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Famine to Feast (pg 1 of 2) (cont. from pg 1) You seem to like it, though. I'm a logical thinker and I'm pretty good at problem solving. I wouldn't be teaching geometry if I wasn't. And it's all logical to me. It makes sense. It's opened a door for me that probably needed to be opened. I had gone back to school and gotten a master's in math education in '90. I'm forty-seven years old. My daughter left for school two years ago. And I've been sitting in the same classroom for eighteen years. It was time for a change. The Virtual High School came along at a time in my life when I needed something new. But one of the most important things is the help we've gotten. I feel like I've been constantly supported by the [VHS] staff and by some of the teachers. I feel like those of us who really discussed things from the beginning were the ones who got the most benefit, the training that Concord offered us.
A page from Teague's online Geometry course.
What is the difference between preparing for a regular classroom course and preparing for an online course? When I first started preparing the [VHS] lessons I had a sense of panic that I wasn't going to be able to get in everything I wanted. Bruce [VHS Director] wrote me back a message one day and he quoted Mark Twain, who had written a really long letter to a friend. At the end of the letter he said 'I would have written you a shorter letter but I didn't have time.' When you have to be short and concise and to the point, I really think you think through what you are doing much more carefully. Your planning is done much more carefully. You want every minute to count and be valuable. Unfortunately, I think sometimes in the classroom we have our children do what we might call busy work. I have always tried to avoid that, but there's no room for busy work in this course. But really and truly we won't know how well we've done until we've had a group of students go all the way through. How do your kids feel about taking a course online? They're pretty excited. Part of that is because I'm so excited. I have let them know that it's pretty remarkable that here we are in little Lumberton and they're one of maybe 600 students in the nation being exposed to the Virtual High School. We limited our enrollment to seniors to begin with. They're pretty mature
in their attitude. They're going to have a lot of freedom because they'll
be in the library working pretty much at their computer, and they'll come
to me if there's a problem.
Tell me about Lumberton. We have about 1,300 students. We are definitely a low-wealth county. Robinson County has been traditionally tobacco country. Very agricultural. We have probably the most unique situation that you will find in the United States-you can't look at Robinson County and say in the normal sense that there are any minorities. It's almost exactly one-third white, one-third Indian, and one-third Black. How long have you been there? I grew up in Lumberton. I went away to college. My husband and I lived away for five or six years and then we moved back here just before my daughter was born. I graduated from this high school. Sitting in my calculus classroom this year I can look out and see four faces that are children of people I graduated from high school with. So I have a very vested interest in the education of these children, more so than I probably would anywhere else, because I feel like a lot of these children are family.
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