Author Archives: Terry Lee Marzell
Florida’s Katrina Madok garners prestigious PAEMST honor
Fifth grade teacher Katrina Madok of Key West, Florida, has garnered a prestigious 2022 PAEMST honor. Photo Credit: keys news.com
I always enjoy sharing stories about exceptional educators who have earned accolades for their work in the classroom. One of these is Katrina Madok, an elementary STEM teacher from Key West, Florida. She has garnered a 2022 Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching (PAEMST). This prestigious award honors the dedication, hard work, and important role that America’s teachers play in supporting learners who will become future STEM professionals, including computer technologists, climate scientists, mathematicians, innovators, space explorers, and engineers.
Katrina teaches science to fifth graders at Gerald Adams Elementary School. Her students are part of the Gifted Education program there. She has also taught at Marathon High School and Kesher Academy, an independent Jewish Day School for students with learning disabilities and developmental delays. Before moving to Florida, Katrina taught in Southern California for ten years. In all, her career as an educator has spanned more than 30 years.
In her classroom, Katrina creates curriculum that involves hands-on science investigations, regularly incorporating STEM challenges. She advances environmental education through school-wide recycling, gardening, and endangered species awareness projects. She also integrates coding and robotics activities on her campus, leading to the creation of after-school bots and coding groups. In these groups, students as early as kindergarten actively use a variety of robots to engage critical thinking skills and learn the foundations for coding.
Katrina has contributed to her school in other ways, too. She has written several grants, she has served as an advisory board member at Infiniscope for two years, she has coached Odyssey of the Mind Teams, and she has participated in citizen science projects with her students. She has also presented at local, state, and national conferences on topics related to robotics and STEM.
In addition to her PAEMST honors, Katrina has earned numerous other accolades for her work as an educator. Last year, she was selected by NASA to help lead a program called Inifiniscope. The program provides exploratory science activities and lessons using experts in NASA data and NASA subject matter. In 2014, she garnered the Elementary Florida Ag in the Classroom Award. She has also been recognized numerous times by the Monroe County School District, the Key West Chamber of Commerce, the state of Florida and a host of other national science programs.
Katrina earned a Bachelor’s degree in Liberal Arts and her Master’s degree in Special Education, both from the University of California at San Diego.
To read more about Katrina Madok, click this link to an article about her published on keysnews.com.
Share this:
Educator Gladys Kamakuokalani Brandt advanced social causes
Educator Gladys Kamakuokalani Brandt worked tirelessly to advance social causes, especially the knowledge of Hawaiian students about their own culture. Photo Credit: Kamehaha Schools
Many hardworking educators dedicate themselves to social causes of importance in addition to their classroom responsibilities. One of these is this beautiful lady, Gladys Kamakuokalani Brandt, a Native Hawaiian teacher, who worked tirelessly towards increasing the knowledge of Native Hawaiian students about their own culture.
Gladys is old enough to have attended the funeral services in 1917 of Queen Liliuokalani, the last reining monarch of Hawaii, and still young enough to witness the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 which brought the United States into World War II.
When Gladys began her career as a teacher, she worked in public schools in Hawaii. Eventually she became an instructor at the prestigious Kamehameha Schools, a private institution set up to educate Native Hawaiian students.
As a youngster, Gladys was led to feel deeply ashamed of her Hawaiian heritage, so much so that she rubbed her face with lemon juice to lighten her complexion. By the time she became the Principal of Kamehameha Schools, however, she had resolved to fight tirelessly for the inclusion of courses to preserve Native Hawaiian culture. She supported instruction in Hawaiian language, song, and the controversial standing hula dance which had been forbidden by the school’s trustees. The story of her work is truly an inspirational one.
Equally inspirational is the story of the dedication and sacrifice of Hawaii’s teachers in the days and weeks following the bombing of Pear Harbor. From serving as ambulance drivers, setting up shelters for survivors, teaching their students how to use gas masks, taking their students into the sugar cane fields to harvest the crops, and re-establishing some semblance of order for their students when school resumed, their deeds are truly remarkable.
You can read about Gladys and her fellow Hawaiian teachers in my book, Chalkboard Champions: Twelve Remarkable Teachers Who Educated America’s Disenfranchised Students.
Share this:
Teacher, coach, and Columbine hero Dave Sanders
Author Terry Lee Marzell examines plaque honoring slain educator Dave Sanders at the Columbine Memorial in Littleton, Colorado. Photo Credit: Hal Marzell
While visiting the Denver area in 2018, I had the unique opportunity to visit the Columbine Memorial which honors the innocent lives lost in the Columbine High School massacre. There I paid homage to Dave Sanders, a truly heroic teacher who lost his life during the shooting.
Dave was born on October 22, 1951, in Eldorado, Saline County, Illinois. He was the youngest of five children. Sadly, his father passed away when Dave was only four years old. Following his father’s death, the young boy was raised by his widowed mother in Newtown, Indiana.
Even as a youngster, Dave excelled at athletics. Known for being a consistent and dependable player, he participated in basketball, baseball, and cross country. After his 1969 graduation from Fountain Central High School in Veedersburg, Dave enrolled at Nebraska Western Junior College in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, where he earned his Associate’s Degree. He then transferred to Chadron State College in Chadron, Nebraska. He earned his Bachelor’s degree in Education from Chadron in 1974.
That same year, Dave accepted his first teaching position at Columbine High School in an unincorporated area of Jefferson County, Colorado, near the Denver suburb of Littleon. There he taught business classes, including typing, keyboarding, business, business law, and economics. He also worked with other teachers in the Business Department to organize career days and arrange for guest speakers to visit classes.
Chalkboard Hero, teacher, and coach Dave Sanders. Image courtesy of Conie Sanders
But it was as a coach that Dave truly excelled. Early in his career he coached boys’ baseball, basketball, cross country, and soccer. In his later years, he coached girls’ basketball, softball, and track. In 1995, Dave’s girls’ softball team reached the Class 5A state finals, and the same year, his girls’ basketball team qualified for a coveted berth in the annual Sweet 16 Tournament. “His ability to coach was not so much about his ability to do the sport, but about his ability to analyze the mechanics of the sport, the kinesiology of it,” colleague Joe Marshall once described. “It didn’t matter what he coached. He coached kids, he didn’t coach a sport. He truly devoted himself to the athletes,” Joe continued. In addition to his coaching responsibilities for Columbine, Dave and his colleague, Rick Bath, coached basketball camps, softball tournaments, open batting cage sessions, and a B league girls’ softball program during the summers.
Dave’s career as a teacher and coach spanned 25 years. Tragically, this outstanding educator and coach was shot and killed on April 20, 1999, when two students carried out a mass shooting at Columbine High School. During the massacre, the intrepid teacher organized an evacuation of the area, led a group of approximately 200 students to safety, and warned unsuspecting teachers and students in other classrooms of the danger. He is credited with saving at least 200 lives that fateful day before he succumbed from his gunshot wounds.
For his heroism, Dave Sanders was honored in 1999 with the ESPY Arthur Ashe Courage and Humanitarian Award. The same year, he was recognized by the National Consortium for Academics and Sports with the Giant Steps Award for Male Coach. You can read more about him in my second book, Chalkboard Heroes.
Share this:
Elem teacher Constance Clayton: Philadelphia trailblazer
Trailblazer Constance Clayton, an elementary school teacher, became the first African American and the first woman to become the Superintendent of the School District of Philadelphia. Photo Credit: The Philadelphia Tribune
There are many fine teachers who go on to positions of leaderships within their districts. They may even become trailblazers in the profession! One of these is Constance Clayton, who became the first African American and the first woman to become the Superintendent of the School District of Philadelphia.
Constance was born in Philadelphia in 1933. As a youngster, she attended the city’s Girls’ High, Jay Cooke Junior High School, and Paul L. Dunbar School. After her high school graduation, she went on to earn her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Temple University in 1955 and her PhD from the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania in 1981.
Once she earned her degrees, Constance inaugurated her career in education when she accepted a position teaching fourth grade at William H. Harrison Elementary School in North Philadelphia. She spent 16 years in the classroom. Next, between 1971 to 1972, she worked for the US Department of Labor in Washington, DC, she became the director of the Women’s Bureau for the Middle Atlantic States. Her work there involved improving the status of employment equity for women. In 1973, she returned to Philadelphia, where she became the first Director, and then the Associate Superintendent, of the Early Childhood Program for the school district.
In 1982, Constance was selected for the position of Superintendent of Schools for Philadelphia. With this selection, the former classroom teacher became the first African American and the first woman to become the Superintendent of the Philadelphia schools. She served in this role for 11 years before her retirement in 1993.
In Philadelphia, the influence of this Chalkboard Champion still goes far and wide. “She has a big heart, and there are children that still remember her from when she was a teacher, an educator, and principal,” declares colleague Howard C. Stevenson, who has known Clayton for more than 20 years. “We still hear about her contributions in that regard.”
To read more about Constance Clayton, click on this link to a story about her published in the Philadelphia Tribune.
