Grandma Mercia, Mother Jones, and Teaching West Virginia

The recent teachers’ strike in West Virginia has me thinking about my Grandmother, Mercia Dunmire. She taught in a one-room schoolhouse in Monongah, West Virginia, a community framed by mountains and mines, teaching the children of coal miners and subsistence farmers in a multi-grade classroom. As family mythology tells it, after noticing children coming to school hungry, Grandma Mercia organized an effort to feed everyone every day. Parents who could do so donated from their gardens and pantries, and older students cooked lunch, learning to prepare food and sustain the group by working and eating together. In the guise of a daily home economics lesson, Grandma Mercia’s students learned service and community, caring for each other as an act of equity. She fed others’ children even while she struggled to feed her own, racking up debt for groceries on credit at Manchins’ store after her husband died, sealed in a fire-filled mine. Grandma Mercia was like that--she saw opportunities out of need and struggled to help her students in ways beyond teaching them to write and read. She filled my shelves with books, but, more importantly, she influenced me to be aware in the world, to see and struggle against injustice, and to teach.

Mercia Dunmire in her first year of teaching, 1929.

In 2007, I represented West Virginia as our state’s Teacher of the Year, attending several events and conferences where teachers from all US states and territories gathered together to learn from each other and raise our collective voice. At one of our events, we dressed to represent our home states. Given that so many recognizable costumes related to West Virginia are caricatures grounded in stereotype, I wanted to choose a memorable and impactful way of representing our heritage and history. I dressed as Mother Jones. I pulled my hair in a bun and donned a black dress and wire rim glasses. I carried a sign marked with her words: “Sit down and read. Educate yourself for the coming conflicts.” I found myself explaining many times who she was, what she meant to miners, what she meant to West Virginia, and what she meant to me. Like Grandma Mercia, Mother Jones taught me through her legacy about how to be in the world.

Today, I’m thinking of Grandma Mercia, Mother Jones, and teaching in West Virginia. Today, teachers are picketing and rallying, closing down the schools for the 8th day in a row, fighting to raise pay from 48th in the nation and for adequate healthcare for all public employees (myself included, since I’ve moved to the university classroom). Today, our governor owes more in back taxes than a teacher will see in a lifetime, our state legislature refused to pass a severance tax that could fund public health insurance, and a coal boss runs for senate with the blood of 29 miners on his hands; our world doesn’t look much different now than it did 100 years ago, echoing with injustice. Today, it’s our teachers, red bandanas around their necks and holding signs, who are waging the fight, yet they are still caring for students, even out of the classroom: packing lunches, spreading word about how we can help through organizations like Morgantown’s Pantry Plus More who are feeding students while they’re out of school.

These are my thoughts and my experiences, but I know they resonate with other teachers. This is just my story, except when it’s not. I can see, in this moment, that West Virginia teachers are standing in the light of Grandma Mercia and Mother Jones. Whether she is a hellraiser heroine on the picket line or an everyday activist peeling potatoes for the soup, a West Virginia teacher is an agent of change and a fierce advocate for students. And, at the heart of it all, is literacy. Reading is revolution. Writing is power. We must remember, as Mother Jones said, “reformation, like education, is a journey.” Teachers do the work of progress every day, in and out of the classroom. Especially in this moment, our teachers are educating us: these strike days are readings in civic literacy, in social movements, in what it means to be a West Virginian. The teachers walk the line, writing the people’s history, and we are students, all.

All Roads Lead to Home: Reflections on Space Camp

I spent the last week of July in Huntsville, Alabama, at The US Space and Rocket Center’s International Space Camp for Educators. While there, I stretched beyond the limits of anything I ever thought I would do. Among many other activities, I learned to read topographical maps of Mars; helped to create and launch a rocket; worked to build a heat shield out of copper mesh and tinfoil and test it with a blowtorch; performed an extra-vehicular activity to build a structure outside a space station on a mock mission; collaborated with others in mission control to launch and land a space shuttle as my team’s flight director; and experienced 1/6th gravity in a moon walk simulation. Along with 23 international participants, the 56 American teachers of the year went non-stop for seven days, from 7 am to 10 pm each day. After seven days, I returned wired, inspired, and exhausted.

When I recovered enough to actually start thinking about the implications of my week as a mock astronaut, one lesson seemed to shine above all others: the further away I went, the more signs I saw of home.

It started on the first day of camp, when Sang-Ki, the educator from South Korea, sang “Country Roads” to me on the bus at 7:30 am. This in itself did not seem unusual, since people all over the world have a tendency to break into their best John Denver renditions as soon as one mentions being from West Virginia. It's true: I’ve personally had it happen in Japan and in Thailand.

Another unsurprising West Virginia reference was frequent discussion of Chuck Yeager, a Lincoln County native and the first person to fly faster than the speed of sound. This, too, was expected, since Yeager was the director of the first Space School at Edwards Air Force Base, the training program responsible for producing the first astronauts.

During a break one afternoon, I went for a walk with the teachers of the year from New Hampshire, Tennessee, and Rhode Island, and we wandered onto a field used for testing student built rockets. Near the launching frames was a monument to Homer Hickam, the author of Rocket Boys, which is set in his hometown of Coalwood in MacDowell County. While we know Hickam primarily as a West Virginia Writer, he is better known in Huntsville as an Aerospace Engineer and astronaut trainer, dedicating much of his adult life to education and exploration. His books were on the shelves in the gift shop, and many of the other teachers had read them and shared them with kids.

Again, I had expected these references to home. Then things started to get more surprising. On Wednesday, we had a presentation from, a discussion with, and books signed by Ed Buckbee, the press person for the first manned space flights, and the founder of space camp. Mr. Buckbee is a native of Hampshire County and was educated in Morgantown (my hometown) at West Virginia University.

At Space Camp, teachers are divided into teams of about 15 people, and these teams work together in classes and on missions. Each team has two leaders, Space Camp employees who facilitate activities and serve as guides. One of our team leaders, Dan Oates, lives just over the mountain from me in Romney, WV. He has been a teacher-leader at Space Camp for seventeen years. He has also been fundamental in creating opportunities for thousands of children as the creator of SCI-VIS, a Space Camp experience for the visually impaired. Dan, along with Ed Buckbee, was inducted into Space Camp’s Hall of Fame as part of the 25th anniversary celebration this summer.

As one might imagine, I was beginning to feel a little stunned in the shadow of so many amazing West Virginians. And then things got weird.

On Friday, I had the chance to briefly visit with a little league team with members from Paw Paw, a town in the county where I live. They were passing through on their way to a tournament and had arranged for the afternoon at the Space and Rocket Center museum. We took a few photos, and I was again reminded of home.

And then, on Saturday morning in the airport, Dan stopped me to introduce me to a little boy from Romney. He was a fifth grader, and his favorite subject was science. As we posed for a picture in the terminal, he was clearly nervous at the thought of the adventure ahead of him. I was still coming down at the end of mine, and I told him that he was going to have a great time. When I explained that I had just had the most amazing week doing everything he was about to do, he looked at me—really looked at me—making eye contact for the first time in our conversation. I hope I left him a little less afraid, and I know that he has been changed by his week in Huntsville, as I am, though maybe not in the same way or for the same reasons.

Anyone who knows me knows that I look for greater meaning in simplistic images; English teachers do that. I look for signs and symbols, evidence of the universe at work in my daily life. In the air as I headed toward West Virginia, I tried very hard to piece together the meaning of all these encounters with home. I was supposed to be exploring the cosmos, right? But these connections kept me grounded—and not just grounded on Earth—grounded at home. With each connection I made, I felt the umbilical pull of my home state. And in these connections, I’d seen changed lives, and West Virginians who changed and will change them. I met pioneers of the past: Yeager and Hickam, who changed America’s technological and exploratory capabilities. I met visionaries who are making a difference in the present: Buckbee, who directly touched the lives of half a million people, as Space Camp celebrated its 500,00th participant this summer, and Oates, who saw a need and filled it to touch the lives of over 2000 visually impaired children. And I saw the future: children awed by the dream of possibility and the ways in which learning can be authentic and purposeful.

As part of our orientation, Dan Oates showed us a video news piece from Southern Living about Space Camp for visually impaired kids. I was very moved when one little girl spoke about her experience, saying that in her normal life she was a person who couldn’t see well, but in the SCI-VIS environment she was able to see better than others, and the vision she had enabled her to lead.

Good teachers are like that. We see things clearly when others can not, and we use the vision we have to lead others to see, too. All it takes is one person with one vision and the effort it takes to express it in a way that other people can see it, too. Some people see opportunities, or needs, or possibilities, or potential—whatever we see, it’s up to us to do something with our vision. To find the vantage point where we see best and project the image of our vision as far and wide as we can is the only thing—the greatest thing—we can do. As Christa McAuliffe so eloquently stated: “I touch the future, I teach.”

So here I am in the middle—looking at the past, present, and future—and trying to figure out where I fit. I spent my time at the Space and Rocket Center with 55 other American teachers who are the same as I am. We won the same award, went through the same program at Space Camp. We were in constant contact for the duration of our stay: we played together, worked together, learned together, ate together, and even slept in the same rooms in a dormitory. Yet I am different too, and I’m different in a way that is distinctly West Virginian. I believe in sense of place, and that place shapes who we are, and that as West Virginians we see things a little differently. Maybe my perspective is affected by the way the hills surround me, or by the way the leaves move in the wind, or by the fact that I, unlike so many other Americans, can actually see the stars when I stand in my backyard at night.

I don’t know what it is that sets any one of us apart, but I do know this: NASA is planning to send a human mission to Mars by 2025, and the person who may next set foot on the Moon, or on Mars, may be that boy I met in the airport. More fantastic yet, that Martian explorer may be a kid in my town, in my school, in my class. And if she—or he—is, I want to know that I’ve helped instill the drive to do whatever the heart says, the vision to believe it can be done, the determination to go and explore, and the sense to see and recognize the signs that lead us home.

Sometimes...

Sometimes kids save me, and they don’t even know it.

One cold, January day, I am feeling strained, stressed, and awful. I have been working for several days on a major report due in response to a fellowship I’ve received. The package is to be postmarked the next day. I scramble to finish typing, and I need to proofread before I send the thirty plus pages out. I print to my desktop inkjet. No ink. I print to the main staff room laser. A malfunction. I print to the media center laser. Out of service.

Frustrated, I rush down the hall, clutching my flash drive, looking for anyone who might have an available and functional printer. As I’m about the charge into the office, a parent stops me. “Hey!” she smiles, “It’s my son’s favorite teacher!” Her son is largely silent in my class, and he often struggles with his grade. Before this moment, I have no idea that he even likes me. I instantly feel better. When I see him, later, I thank him, and I send his mom a short note, thanking her, too.

Thanks to a very kind colleague, I am able to print, proof, and post my report on time the next day. Yet, more importantly, the kid comes into school and says, at the beginning of class, “My mom says to tell you that you have a beautiful soul.”

As a teacher, much of my job is to make connections with kids and their families, to build communities of learners that extend beyond my own physical reach. This seems obvious to me on a practical level, but I don’t always see evidence that my efforts work, until a kid or a parent says something unexpected that changes my perspective. It’s amazing to me how we touch and are touched just by virtue of the nature of the profession. Yeah, I think moments like these are why I teach.

Say "Cheese!" or My Photographic Learning Curve

When I was recognized with a teaching award, I was not prepared for many of the new roles I would have to play. I was not ready to smile for the camera, to answer reporters’ questions, or to have to present myself as a representative for state education at all times. Still, I learned. I wear make-up. I smile in pictures. I wear colors besides gray, brown, and black. In fact, there is a visible learning curve in the photographs of me as I have become more and more comfortable.

When a cameraman blinds me with a spotlight, I no longer scream: “CarolAnn! Don’t go into the light, CarolAnn!” That went over well, for the record. When I had publicity photos taken with the car that Toyota lent me, I resisted the urge to climb on the hood like Tawny Kitaen. I also exercised extreme restraint when presented with a giant novelty check; I did not ask to be photographed beneath it, as if it were crushing me, and I did not make jokes about trying to cram it into one of the tubes at the bank drive-through. I have had difficulty learning to keep my thoughts to myself (no matter how funny I think they are), and keeping track of my face and body has presented a double challenge. I have learned to stand up straight, finally, after all those years of my mom harassing me, and I have learned, somehow, to lose that frantic, strained look I have always had in front of a camera. Amazingly, about six months into this thing, I have begun to look relaxed, natural, and—for the first time in my life—pretty in pictures.

My past, devastatingly bad photogenic record, however, has made me wary of having my picture taken. Part of the problem is that I am extremely expressive, so the likelihood of a camera catching me making some gruesome face is very high. I once had a student entitle her final reflection for my class “The Many Faces,” and another time, when an album of a special event in my life came back from the photographer, I actually yo-yoed between laughter and tears because of the pictures of me. Hideous. Anyway, it was with years of photographic tragedy weighing on my shoulders that I entered the Oval Office to have my picture made with President and Mrs. Bush.

I guess it didn’t help that I’d had multiple discussions with one of my friends about crossing my eyes and sticking out my tongue when I turned to the camera. Or that I chose to wear very high heels to prevent the world from seeing how short I really am. Or that I’m at the end of the alphabet when we’re in order by state, so I had 53 photographs worth of time for my makeup and hair to wilt and for my brain to consider all of the absurd things I could not say. Or that the whole experience was about eighteen seconds long. The extent of my conversation with the Presidential couple was about three sentences, consisting generally of the words “good morning,” “West Virginia,” “congratulations,” and “thank you.” It was a handshake, a smile, a click, and that’s it. There were no retakes.

When the e-mail attachment of the White House photo came, then, I opened it with much trepidation. What face might I be making? Miraculously, I looked happy, relaxed, and confident. When my principal forwarded it to the whole staff, one of my illustrious colleagues replaced the Bushes’ heads with the ones from Grant Wood’s painting American Gothic, copied it, and distributed a print in everyone’s mailbox—but he left my face alone. My state coordinator had a huge color copy made and framed for me; “That’s your best picture so far,” he said. The kicker was this: when I showed it to my kids, large as life on the whiteboard, they said, in every class: “You look good, but we don’t think you really met them because they look like they’re made of plastic.” And not one of them laughed at the picture of me.

The Aftermath

The morning after the banquet, I ran along the Kanawha in the pre-dawn breeze. I saw geese, a heron, and no other people. The realization of my new, more public identity began to sink in. So my fifteen minutes had arrived.

I returned to the hotel, showered, and met my parents for breakfast. They told me they had seen my interview on television, and they picked up two copies of the local paper, my face staring out from the page. The photographer caught me in the middle of speaking, mouth open. As we boarded the elevator to return to our room, a guy getting off it grabbed me by the arm: “Hey!” he shouted, “I just saw you on TV!” The drive to my parents’ house consisted of my father fiddling incessantly with the radio dial, searching for news coverage of the announcement. I finally gave up listening and crashed out on the backseat.

Immediately following the banquet, my principal had set the phone tree in motion, so everyone at my school would receive the news before morning. It was nice to see the lines of communication used for something besides weather emergencies and cancellations. As a result of this and the press coverage, there was a barrage of new messages in my e-mail congratulating me. I spent about forty minutes replying to them all. My voicemail was full of messages too, some from people whom I didn’t even know had my number. My ex left a message: he had heard my voice on the radio while he was sleeping, thought he was dreaming, and had gone back to sleep, only to wake up to the same voice speaking the same words an hour later. “Guess you answered the Miss America questions better than you thought,” he concluded.

When I arrived at school the next day, my colleagues had filled my classroom with confetti, balloons, and flowers. There was a huge candy bar on my desk—dark chocolate, my favorite—and a card from the rest of the English department. Inexplicably, I sat down at my desk and cried; I felt frightened and thankful, eager and afraid, all at the same time. I barely realized the kind of year that lay ahead; I had some serious learning to do.

My students posted a photograph from the local daily paper on the whiteboard. It was a photo that had been taken for an interview that covered the county announcement of Teacher of the Year and my selection as a finalist for state. It was an acceptable photo the first time it had been in the paper. The problem this time, as it was recycled for the state TOY coverage, was that it had been cropped to show only my face. No hair, no neck. I was not smiling; my face was shiny in the fluorescent lighting. Instead of looking serious, as I had in the complete picture, I looked like I was about to hit someone with a brick. My English 12 class thought it was hilarious: “Look!” they screamed, “you got arrested for DUI!” It was at that point that I knew I had to learn two things I hadn’t expected: to wear makeup, and to smile. I remembered learning that majorettes and models put Vaseline on their teeth to keep their smiles intact. Yuck. I didn’t want lubricated teeth, but I also didn’t want to become the poster child for the cranky English teacher stereotype. How much more did I not know?

The couple of weeks that followed the announcement were full of interviews, invitations, congratulations, impromptu conferences in the grocery store. One man jumped in front of my car so that he could congratulate me as I pulled out of the school parking lot. Once, while I was on a date, people kept stopping to congratulate me (my date knew I was a teacher, but didn’t know about the award); it was an awkward explanation. Two huge banners were hung on the front and back of the school building, and my students started calling me “state teacher of the universe.” I received cards, flowers, and candy from students, my peers, and from retired teachers. The president of my bank sent me a note, as did other community figures. I also received letters from my union representatives, from professional organizations, and from state senators and congress people. I had extensive interviews with reporters from different newspapers, and a significant amount of press coverage on the county and state websites.

My state support team promised me a work session in about a month, once the excitement had ebbed a little. I tried not to panic as I began to realize that I needed their help immediately—once things settled down, it might be too late; I might have already made a complete fool of myself. My life had changed, and I had to adapt in ways I had never anticipated.

The Events Leading Up...

The events leading up to my selection as West Virginia’s Teacher of the Year, 2007 could be described as uncertain and chaotic at best. At the end of the 2005-2006 school year, I had been selected as my school’s teacher of the year by my colleagues, which meant a lot to me. In the day to day life of a school, one’s colleagues see what happens in spite of appearances, so their selection of me was touching and sincere, a true acknowledgement of my hard work.

I did not know that selection at the school level would be followed by a fairly extensive amount of paperwork for eligibility at the county level. In the weeks that followed my school TOY announcement, I completed a series of essays elaborating on my teaching philosophy, my educational background, and my goals for my students and myself. When I was finished, I think I ended up with about ten pages of response to a series of about five questions, all geared toward the county selection team.

Soon, reports started to come back to me about my application documents. One colleague commented that someone on the selection team had told him that I was “head and shoulders above the rest.” Another colleague reported that my essay about how I became a teacher had moved someone else to tears. I shrugged these reports aside. I was inexperienced (in years if not in classroom know-how) and a fifth year teacher in my county. Besides, I had bigger things to worry about: I was going to Japan.

I had been chosen earlier in the spring as a 2006 Japan Fulbright Memorial Fund awardee. This meant that I would be traveling to Japan in June to attend workshops, visit schools, stay with a family, and explore the country. I would be joining 199 other American teachers for this journey on June 11, and I had a heck of a lot to do as that date approached. In addition to the obvious (packing), I had to have a physical, get shots, fill out a bevy of documents, and design a broad-ranging follow-on plan for classroom implementation of the knowledge I would gain while in Japan.

At the end of the first week of June, as I was frantically scrambling to finalize grades, to buy gifts for my hosts in Japan, to complete my follow-on report, to pack, and to stay semi-sane throughout it all, word came from the superintendent that I had been selected as Morgan County’s teacher of the year. Great news! In the Fall, on opening day of school, I would receive an award, money for my classroom, attendance at a conference or professional development of my choice, and the much coveted Teacher of the Year bench—an annual gift from Tom Seely Furniture, a local fine woodworks manufacturer. The bad news? The state level documents were due June 30, the day after my return from Japan.

Over the next few days, I forgot about sleeping. Instead, I set about revising my essays, scheduled a session with a photographer, collected three letters of reference, signed the appropriate forms and collected the other appropriate signatures, and impossibly popped the application documents—which totaled about 17 pages—into the mail the day before I left for Japan.

I boarded the plane on June 11, and was transformed by my experience. I didn’t think about the state application again until the first week of August, when a representative for the West Virginia Department of Education called to schedule an interview. I was one of eleven finalists. About a week later, I drove to Charleston, the state capital (a little over 200 miles away), and checked into my hotel room. My interview was scheduled for noon the next day, Friday, August 11, 2006. I called a good friend, and we went out for Mexican food. Fun led to more fun, margaritas led to more margaritas, and I returned to my hotel room a little later than I had planned. “Why worry?” I asked myself. “They won’t pick me.”

Too soon, I dragged myself from restless sleep, attempted to sweat it out at the hotel gym, choked down a plain bagel, a banana, and several cups of coffee, and headed to the beautiful capital complex to face the grilling of my life. I arrived too early, and I drank a diet cola in the cafeteria, reading and re-reading the speech I had prepared, and trying to settle my nerves. At ten before noon, headache under control, I forced myself to the elevator and rode to the personnel office. I wondered about all the people who were hoping for me to do well, counting on me to shine; although I would do my best, I knew that I had only the smallest chance of success. Besides, the accolades I’d received were already more than I’d expected—the reward I had already received was more than enough. I knew that the people who were with me every day appreciated me. What else is there, really?

I faced five panelists in what felt, to me, a grueling interview. It was all I could do to not respond to their questions with a blank-faced shrug. I didn’t know—I still don’t know—what we can do in public schools to compete with private schools; I’m not even sure we should compete with them. I don’t know what is the biggest problem we face in public education today; I know my classroom and my school, but I’m not sure there is one big problem that exists across the board. I answered as thoughtfully and as honestly as I could. I felt more and more lost each second. Maybe I did want this…

Then, I shared my prepared statement. I spoke about Japan, of course. While there, I experienced an earthquake, and it became a metaphor for me. I worked out a speech based on this idea—teaching and learning as seismic events in one’s life—and I was sure it was good. I am a strong reader and speaker, but I was nervous. When I finished, the faces of my interviewers were blank. “Thank you,” they said as I shook their hands, “see you at the banquet in September.”

I drove home, consoling myself. I blew it. I took off my blazer and threw my pumps into the backseat, driving in my bare feet, blaring the stereo. I didn’t even know I wanted it until the moment it was over. And I blew it. Nothing could be done now. Still, I would be OK, I told myself; whatever I had—my classroom that shouts thinking and individuality, my colleagues who like and respect me, my students who learn from and with me—was enough for me.

And So It Begins...

It is September 12, 2006. I arrive at my parents' house to pick them up. After two hours on the road myself, the three of us will drive an additional 170 miles to Charleston, our state capital, for the annual Teacher of the Year banquet. I have apprehensions about attending. I am a finalist, Morgan County's teacher of the year, one of eleven who made it through the written application process and an excruciating interview with a selection committee. I have spent a whirlwind summer traveling, learning, teaching, and building a significant amount of anxiety for this very event. I have mixed feelings about this: uncertainty in my own ability, frustration from what I feel was a botched interview, even a slight amount of indecision concerning whether teaching is actually something I want to do for the rest of my life... Tonight, the state teacher of the year will be announced, awarded, and celebrated, and I will be off the hook, free to return to normalcy.

As I walk in the door, my parents offer me a gift. It is a necklace, jade. It is a miniature Inuit symbol, called an inushuk: these are signposts, used to mark dogsled trails in Alaska. "So you don't lose your way," my mom says. Uh oh.

At the pre-dinner reception, I feel myself shaking, tense smile plastered on my face as I clutch my water glass. I am joined by my superintendent, Mr. Temple, and principal, Mr. Ward; their company, and that of my parents, makes me feel less alone. I speak with last year's winner, who is vibrant, dynamic, extroverted--so different from me. Dinner is simple, but good. Tension builds. The speech I have wadded in my pocket--just in case--crinkles every time I move. I feel silly, too young, too inexperienced. I want this to be over. NOW.

My friends at home are all pulling for me. I have told them not to unintentionally tempt fate: "Don't wish for me to be selected," I say, "wish for what's supposed to happen to happen." They look at me askance. They see how hard I work, believe in me so much. I think that it is community that created me as a teacher; my colleagues are like family, and we all work hard together. While I do feel that I am a good teacher, in a career well suited for me at this moment, I work with so many good teachers that I do not feel exceptional. We are all exceptional, and we have built a school around ourselves that reflects this drive toward excellence. Doesn't every school do this? How am I not like everyone else?

The lights dim. One by one, each county teacher is called to the stage to receive recognition. Not all 55 are here, but many are. Then, each finalist is called, and each receives a plaque. When it is my turn, I cross the stage, handshaking and smiling. I return to my seat, relieved I have not fallen over something. Now I'm done.

Or not. When the announcement comes, I look at my mother, and her face is inexpressibly joyful. Mr. Ward bangs his fists on the table. My dad is calm--his normal Zen self. Mr. Temple, I can tell, is not surprised. I stand, stunned, focus on one foot in front of the other, make my way to the stage for a second time this night. I pose for photos, accept accolades, present my speech without a stutter. I speak to reporters from TV, radio, newspapers. I am smiling on the outside, and inside terrified. So begins my year as West Virginia's Teacher of the Year, 2007.