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Celebrate National Education Week by visiting our Apple for the Teacher Tree during the Chamber of Commerce open house at Kump Education Center Wednesday, Nov. 15, from 4:30-6 p.m.
See how our community has benefited by working with Davis & Elkins College. When we made a list of teachers who are honored with Apples on our Tree, we realized that many of them were either professors or students from D&E.
We have so many people from our local college to thank. Even the volunteer typist Imre Barsy, who is making a mailing list, first came to Elkins as a student at D&E. He is also helping us find student volunteers from his Sig Ep fraternity to rake huge sycamore leaves in the lawn before the event. Imre met his wife Debra at D&E, and now several years later, they have retired here, and she is a new KEC Board member.
If you come to visit our "Apple for the Teacher Tree" on Wednesday, you will go to the Learning Lab where a wooden tree created by Randall Arbogast holds wooden apples naming teachers who have made a difference in the lives of their students. Donors have given $500 for each apple to support Kump Center and represent the unique ways that good teachers have helped their students. We have room for more apples on the tree if you know such a teacher.
When I look at that tree, two names jump out at me because those teachers made a difference in my difficult years at Elkins High School. I had a "reading problem" and was not one of the outstanding students at all, but my two mentor teachers helped me survive the ego-sapping pressures of high school. Miss Emily Barry told stories bringing history alive every afternoon. She had grown up in the Gatehouse at D&E, and she developed her dramatic style as a D&E student. Miss Barry helped me start a club for ordinary people like me. Dr. Margaret Goddin taught English at EHS before she went on to graduate school and taught at D&E. She helped me enter and win a statewide short-story contest. Thanks to them both I still love history and writing.
Two more important apples that other donors have added to the teacher tree named professors from D&E who helped me appreciate how hard is has been for women to earn an equal footing in academia.
Dr. Gloria Payne and Dr. Jean Minnick were my colleagues when I first started teaching at D&E myself. Both of them had to struggle to finish graduate school while they were teaching at D&E, and they developed two of the strongest departments at the College by adding and building one new program at a time. They were true mentors who believed in their students.
Elizabeth Tinney and K.J. Shaffer are two local teachers named on the apple tree who represent D&E students over time. I first met Ms. Tinney in the 1960s when she was my mother's math student, and she became a strong science teacher at Tygart Valley High School. Mr. Shaffer was my student at D&E in 1999, and he is now an excellent math teacher who can help anybody learn math, and he is President of the KEC Board