National Teacher of the Year inspired students to carry lessons outside classroom

This year's National Teacher of the Year, a Connecticut history teacher, said teaching her students that she cares must precede all other learning. 

The newly named National Teacher of the Year has turned her personal history into a history lesson that inspires her students. 

Jahana Hayes, a history teacher from Connecticut, persuaded her students to learn about and serve in their communities by first showing them that she cared, the New Haven Register reported.

“What is the use of being the smartest person in the room if you don’t care about the people around you,” Ms. Hayes told the New Haven Register. 

Hayes's students at John F. Kennedy High School in Waterbury, Conn., have taken history lessons outside the classroom, as she taught them to become involved the community by serving with Habitat for Humanity and with other community service organizations, Kathleen Megan reported for the Hartford Courant. She has used her own history as a teenage mother who almost dropped out of school to connect with each of her students, which she said is an essential prerequisite to teaching.

"Making a connection with students – I think that is the most important thing, because students don't learn from people they don't like," Hayes told the Hartford-Courant. 

She described growing up in an urban project with a mother who struggled with drug abuse. But she still managed to pull down top grades in advanced placement classes. She became discouraged, however, when the school transfered her to a remedial program for teen moms after she became pregnant. With the help of a caring high school guidance counselor, she moved back on course.

"I see myself in students who are high-achieving and do very well. I see myself in the students who are kind of disconnected and drifting," Hayes told the Hartford Courant. "I see myself in the students who have addiction in their family or families who may have just gotten evicted.''

Hayes's devotion to teaching seems to have extended outside of her classroom, as she touched the lives of many students who never took a class from her. Sarah Emanuel-Norwood, a senior, says she entered Kennedy High School with a distrust of teachers. She acted up and was regularly suspended for cutting class, dress code, and causing disruptions in class, she told the Connecticut Republican-American. Hayes noticed the problems and printed out her class schedule so she knew where she was supposed to be.

"She was calling my teachers to make sure I was in class," Sarah said. "If I wasn't, she would come find me."

Hayes visited with Sarah's teachers and convinced the teenager that she cared.

"Mrs. Hayes changed the way I look at teachers," Sarah told the Republican-American. "Now I just feel like I have to get to know them first to know if they care or not."

Her ability to teach students that someone cares persuaded the Council of Chief State School Officers in Washington, D.C., that her influence should be stretched even further outside the classroom, so she will spend the next year traveling the country as an ambassador for education.

"It is a 'gift' to give others the feeling that someone values and realizes their worth," Waterbury Superintendent Kathleen Ouellette wrote in Hayes's application. "This defines Jahana's influence." 

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to National Teacher of the Year inspired students to carry lessons outside classroom
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2016/0428/National-Teacher-of-the-Year-inspired-students-to-carry-lessons-outside-classroom
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe