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Maryland Teacher Is NFL's First Pick

One teacher's commitment to student athletes pays off with a new title: NFL Teacher of the Year.

When Springbrook High School teacher Joyce Amatucci received a Christmas present in the mail from former student Shawn Springs (inset photo), now a cornerback with the Seattle Seahawks, she wasn't surprised. "He's been telling me for years that he would send me a Seahawks team jersey," says the Silver Springs, Maryland, Spanish teacher. But when she looked inside, she didn't find a jersey. Instead, she found a letter from the National Football League, congratulating her on being chosen as the 2000 NFL Teacher of the Year, a program that honors teachers who've had a positive influence on NFL players.

Along with the letter was a handwritten note from Springs, who graduated from Springbrook in 1993. It read: "This is what you get for all the yelling you did."

"I've been known to yell, as well as throw tantrums," Amatucci agrees with a laugh.

As the unofficial "mom" to every athlete at the 2,000-plus-student school, Amatucci keeps an open classroom door every day during prep period and for two hours after school for free tutoring sessions, in any subject.

She also voluntarily keeps tabs on student athletes' weekly grade sheets through a program she created called "Athletics Support Program."

"The other teachers will E-mail or call me and say, 'You have to help me with so-and-so. He didn't write his paper,' or 'He got an F on his test,'" says the 30-year teaching veteran. "So I'll have a heart-to-heart after school with that athlete, or I might just go over to practice and tell the coach, 'Sorry, so-and-so can't practice today. He didn't do his paper.' And the coach sends him to me."

Amatucci is also involved with the NCAA Clearinghouse and Alternative Education Program for Marginal Students. She also attends every game, every sport.

Amatucci says her commitment to athletes comes easily, especially because the entire school staff supports her role. Ironically, her "meddling" also makes her a beloved teacher. In his nomination form, Springs called her "the glue that keeps the whole school together."

"She makes her students feel secure, safe and cared for," says Springs, now in his fourth year with the NFL, "whether it's having them over for dinner at her house and helping them successfully complete a paper, or giving them a ride home when they stay after school to work on homework assignments.

"She is respected and admired by every student at Springbrook,"adds Springs.

"I'm just overwhelmed," says Amatucci, who was honored with a $5,000 personal grant and a $10,000 check for Springbrook at the NFL All-Star game in Hawaii last month. "Working with the athletes has made my job more fun, especially because I am the antithesis of athletics myself. I get all I need through these kids."

Last March, John Street and his fourth grade students at Newcastle Public School in rural Newcastle, Nebraska, (population: 270) hit upon a great idea: Use the power of E-mail to teach geography.

"I thought it would be clever to send an E-mail from the class asking recipients to respond with their locations and forward our E-mail on to as many people as they could," says Street. Students would then plot the respondents' location on a map.

"I was hoping 500 people would respond," he adds. "Looking back, I can't believe how naive I was!"

Within hours of sending the E-mail to only 20 people in Street's Yahoo address book, students were receiving messages back from China, South America, and several Southern states.

Now, one year later, Street estimates they've received more than 150,000 responses to that first message. In one 24-hour period, the class box received more than 9,000 messages--375 E-mails per hour.

"We get lengthy letters and lots of photographs from all over the world," he says. "People send wedding pictures, baptism pictures, baby pictures, dog pictures. We got photos of a zebra and other animals from a missionary in South Africa, and a man from Antarctica sent us shots of himself on the ice."

Street says the experiment has been a powerful lesson for his small-town school. "I'll never again doubt what a tremendous and sometimes overwhelming learning tool the Internet really is."

Major Shakespeare

You probably wouldn't expect to find a retired Air Force pilot doing pirouettes and dancing around a classroom of young teenagers to get them excited about Shakespeare.

But Donald Huston, a ninth grade English teacher at Chickasha Junior High School in Oklahoma, has never been conventional.

"I think some people are a little fearful of Air Force majors, just like others are fearful of learning Shakespeare," he says. "I'd like to think I take the fear out of both those things."

For 20 years, Huston flew B-52 planes around the world and lived in exotic locales such as Guam, Thailand, and Japan. When he retired in 1991, "Shakespeare"--a nickname he earned because of his love for the author--began substitute teaching and taking courses toward his master's in English.

"Substitute teaching was a lot like flying," he says with a chuckle. "Except when you fly airplanes you have some sort of control."

With five years of full-time teaching now under his belt, Huston knows that just because he slips into the language of Shakespeare easily doesn't mean that all his students do.

To make them more comfortable, he asks them to insult or compliment each other using Shakespeare's words. It's this creative and animated teaching style that recently earned him a nomination for Chickasha Teacher of the Year.

Calendar Art Says 'No' to Tobacco

"I'm too smart to start." That's just one of several catchy phrases Russ Shaffer's fourth grade students are repeating these days--students who are too smart to start using tobacco.

For seven years, Shaffer--who teaches art at four elementary schools in Brooke County, West Virginia--has coordinated a calendar of art project featuring his students' artwork and tobacco-free messages.

"The calendars are learning tools," says Shaffer. "The kids don't participate just to draw pretty pictures. They do it to get anti-tobacco messages out."

Shaffer is determined to help kids understand the seriousness of tobacco, which is the leading cause of preventable death in the United States. He's especially concerned by national polls and anonymous surveys in his own classrooms that indicate many young students are tempted to try using tobacco.

By involving them in the calendar project, he's hopeful they'll learn early to avoid the temptation.

"There is a lot of enthusiasm for this project from the kids, parents, and even grandparents," Shaffer notes."If that excitement entices kids to not start smoking, then we've won half the battle."

Last year, the governor of West Virginia used the calendar to try to pass smokeless tobacco legislation.

"My ultimate goal," says Shaffer, "is to have large agencies, like the Cancer Society, see the calendar and use it on a massive scale to bring attention to the cause."

Close Encounters with Ozzy

It was 1983, a time of big hair and big music. It was also the year clean-cut Ohio math teacher Mark Meuser accepted a dare from his third period high school students and accompanied them to his first hard rock concert: Ozzy Osbourne.

"Looking back, it was an incredible experience," says the 29-year veteran at Gahanna Lincoln High School. "One I wanted to relive and share over and over again."

In 2000, he got his wish. No, he didn't check out the latest hard rock tours. He published a book, Close Encounters (Rivercross), documenting the humorous, touching, and even heartbreaking stories about students who have come and gone from his classroom and how they have touched his life.

His short story about the Ozzy Osbourne adventure, "This Isn't Ozzie and Harriet," is just one of many vignettes that have caught readers' attention. Close Encounters spent weeks on Amazon.com's top five list in Ohio.

From the stunts he pulled in his rookie days to tales of today, Meuser relates the small successes of the classroom as they occur, one at a time.

Meuser says the book reflects his own transformation as a teacher. "It celebrates those moments when teachers and students connect beyond the classroom walls."