Michigan’s Nita Nicholie: Science teacher extraordinaire

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Nita Nicholie

Nita Nicholie, science teacher at St. Joseph High School in St. Joseph, Michigan.

Ever wonder if what you do in the classroom truly makes a difference in the lives of your students? Well, here is a story that proves that it does. This story is about Nita Nicholie, a science teacher at St. Joseph High School, a public school located in St. Joseph, Michigan.

This amazing educator earned her Bachelor’s degree in Biology, Chemistry, and Physics from Michigan State University in 1985. When Nita started inaugurated her career in the classroom, she thought she’d teach for only a few years. That was 32 years ago. “I went into teaching because I love science, but I stayed in teaching because I love the kids,” Nita confesses.

Former student Autumn Roth, who took an Honors Physics with Nita before heading off to college, remembers, “On the first day of class she burst into the room singing show-tunes at the top of her lungs. I knew right then that this was going to be a good class.”

Nita’s influence on the lives of her students extends beyond her classroom. Over the years, this compassionate educator and her family have taken in over 20 students to live with them. “A lot of times they just needed a safe place to sleep, to have a warm shower in the morning and food before they go to sleep at night,” the chalkboard champion remarks. Nita even has an alarm set on her phone to remind her to text some students to make sure they’re awake and heading to school. It’s all part of connecting with her students, and doing whatever she can to help them be successful in school. For her efforts, Nita has earned special recognition. In 2010, she was nominated for Michigan Teacher of the Year.

“There’s no formula about how to be a great teacher,” Nita asserts. “If I really truly love what I do, the kids know it.”

Nita Nicholie: truly an inspiration.

Sandra Adickes: Legacy of a Freedom School teacher

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Thirty-year-old Sandra Adickes was an energetic and idealistic high school English teacher from New York City the year she ventured south into Mississippi to teach in a Freedom School. The goal of the summer program was to empower the black community to register to vote and to help bridge some of the gap of educational neglect that had long been a tradition in that Jim Crow state. Both blacks and whites realized that only through education and participation in the democratic process could African Americans ever hope to improve their lot.
 
The enterprise was not without danger. On the first day of Freedom Summer, three workers involved in the program disappeared while investigating the firebombing of the church facility designated for their voter recruitment activities. Six weeks later, as Sandra Adickes conducted her classes in Hattiesburg, the badly beaten and bullet-ridden bodies of the three missing men were discovered buried in an earthen dam in nearby Neshoba County.
 
At summer’s end, Sandra accompanied her fearless students when they decided to integrate the Hattiesburg Public Library. Sandra was arrested in the effort. Read her riveting story, and what became of her courageous students, in her book Legacy of a Freedom School. You can also find a chapter about this remarkable teacher in my book, Chalkboard Champions., available from amazon.

Rosie Reid named California Teacher of the Year, 2019

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Congratulations to Rosie Reid, an outstanding educator from Walnut Creek, California, who has just been named a California Teacher of the Year for 2019.

Rosie’s career has spanned 16 years, the last two at Northgate High School in the Mt. Diablo Unified School District. She was the first in her family to go to college. She credits this achievement to her teachers, and says she decided to become a teacher to pay this forward.

Rosie, a Language Arts teacher, is a member of the English Learner Review Team which monitors English-language learners and mentors ESL teachers. Most recently, Rosie founded and leads an equity task force at her high school. “I strive to be a status quo disruptor and an agent of social justice, while engaging in a rigorous, standards-based English curriculum,” declares Rosie. “So often teachers feel that if they are thinking about issues of equity and implicit bias, they must compromise rigor in order for all students to be successful; in fact it is by helping our most socially marginalized students develop literacy (and numeracy) skills that we may achieve social equity,” she asserts.

Rosie employs a number of strategies to achieve success in her classroom. She uses standardized test data to view individual student progress, identify patterns with groups of students, and remediate achievement gaps for marginalized students. In addition, she invites guest speakers to come to her classroom, and she designs real world projects to give her students a broader perspective. In order to encourage participation from all students, Rosie requires daily practice of language skills. To ensure inclusivity, she selects materials from a diverse range of authors and articles about relevant and compelling social issues so that every student sees themselves in the coursework, feels the work is important, and realizes how much their voices matter.

Rosie Reid: a true chalkboard champion.

Willa Brown Chappell: The teacher of Tuskegee Airmen

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Many exceptional teachers use their instructional expertise to work with students outside of the classroom. Willa Brown Chappell, the first African American woman licensed to fly in the United States, is an excellent example of this.

Willa was born January 22, 1906, in Glasgow, Kentucky. She earned her degree in education from Indiana State Teachers College in 1927. She also completed the requirements for an MBA from Northwestern University in 1937. Following her college graduation, Willa was employed as a high school teacher at Roosevelt High School in Gary, Indiana, and later as a social worker in Chicago.

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Willa was always seeking challenges and adventures in her life, especially if they could be found outside the limited career fields normally open to African Americans at that time. She decided to learn to fly, studying with Cornelius R. Coffey, a certified flight instructor and expert aviation mechanic at a racially segregated airport in Chicago. Willa earned her private pilot’s license in 1938. Later, Willa and Cornelius married and founded the Coffey School of Aeronautics at Harlem Airport in Chicago, where together they trained black pilots and aviation mechanics. Willa conducted the classroom instruction and Cornelius conducted the in-flight practice.

In 1939, Willa, Cornelius, and their friend Enoch P. Waters founded the National Airmen’s Association of America. Their goal was to secure admission for black aviation cadets into the US military. As the organization’s national secretary and the president of the Chicago branch, Willa became an activist for racial equality. She persistently lobbied the US Government for integration of black pilots into the segregated Army Air Corps and the federal Civilian Pilot Training Program (CPTP), a system established by the Civil Aeronautics Authority just before the outbreak of World War II. The CPTP’s purpose was to provide a pool of civilian pilots for use during national emergencies. Willa was given the rank of an officer in this first integrated unit. In 1948, when Congress finally voted to allow separate-but-equal participation of blacks in civilian flight training programs, the Coffey School of Aeronautics was one of a select few private aviation schools selected for participation. Later, her flight school was selected by the US Army to provide black trainees for the Air Corps pilot training program at the Tuskegee Institute. Willa was instrumental in training more than 200 students who went on to become Tuskegee pilots. Eventually, Willa Brown became the coordinator of war-training service for the Civil Aeronautics Authority and a member of the Federal Aviation Administration’s Women’s Advisory Board. She was the first black female officer in the Civil Air Patrol and the first black woman to hold a commercial pilot’s license in the United States.

This remarkable educator and pioneer aviatrix passed away on July 18, 1992. In 2010, Willa was awarded the Distinguished Alumni Award by the Indiana State University Alumni Association. She was inducted into the Aviation Hall of Fame in her native Kentucky in 2003.

To find out more about this remarkable chalkboard champion, you can read a chapter about her in my book, Chalkboard Heroes, which is available on amazon.com and the website for Barnes and Noble.

Check out this teacher-made YouTube channel for ESL videos

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Here is a wonderful resource you might want to check out. Rachel’s English is a YouTube channel dedicated to helping non-native speakers improve their spoken English and listening comprehension.

Philadelphia teacher Rachel creates You Tube channel to share her ESL videos.

The channel is created by ESL teacher Rachel. Having taught off and on since 1999, Rachel became interested in developing a pronunciation-focused resource while she was living in Germany under the Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship program in 2008. Rachel, who is also a classical singer, studied with highly acclaimed vocal teachers and coaches and brings a body of detailed knowledge connected to the voice, placement, and the musical nature of speech to her work as a pronunciation coach.

Rachel lives in Philadelphia.  She was born and raised in Florida. She went to college in Indiana where she studied applied math, computer science, and music. She also attended graduate school for Opera Performance in Boston. Then she spent eight years in New York City, where many of her videos were filmed, before moving to Philadelphia.

Rachel currently offers 625 videos through her channel, and she has 1,734,725 subscribers. Way to go, Rachel!