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‘Futuristic teacher’ wins nod of approval from peers

By DAN KEGLEY/Staff

When her students return from summer vacation Wednesday, Teresa Hash will see them as she has every year and will all year long, as more than a classroom full of third graders. To her they are little bundles of raw individual potential, and that’s how she approaches education.
“I’m a futuristic teacher,” she said Thursday. “I don’t look at today but where the student can be, using today’s technology. I try to get on their wavelength to create a lifelong learner. That puts me in the student’s seat and not just in the teacher’s seat as driver.”
Hash sat in her classroom in Marion Intermediate School that was “her” room once before, when she was a fourth grader. That room held a reading class.
Since those days, teaching has become more individualized. Research has shown students have different ways of learning. Some are visual, like Hash. Some learn best by hearing. Others are tactile learners, gaining knowledge by touching and doing.
“Differentiation” is what Hash calls teaching students across this spectrum of information intake abilities. “We’re more student focused, meeting individual needs. If there are 21 students, there may be 21 ways to present, to teach, until it’s mastered.”
Hash also looks for ways to use students’ interests as a catalyst for boosting their academic abilities. She’ll find ways, for example, to turn a love for videos into interest in reading about videos, hopefully opening a door to other literary interests.
“I don’t care what you read as long as you’re interested in it,” she said. “I want you to find yourself in reading and learning.”
The need to design possibly a delivery technique for each child in the room begs the question about how that can be accomplished when Standards of Learning represent a de facto, but mandatory, lesson plan.
“Very good planning,” Hash said, that takes a lot of time and shatters the myth that teachers have summers off. “I’ve not had a day off,” she said.
Lesson plans are not all Hash spends her summer on. She said she works one week each summer with the state department of education on its SOL committee, “gathering and sharing ideas.” Working in education outside the county is an opportunity to see what other teachers are doing and adopt the best of their ideas.
That perspective also shows her, she said, the quality of her own school division.
“It all goes back to roots. It takes a community to educate a child,” she said.
As a county native, her roots run deep here, as do her husband’s.
“I love when students walk in,” she said. “If I don’t know them I know their parents or their relatives or their neighbors.”
Hash is beginning her 12th year of teaching and follows generations of educators in her family, although for her it is a second career. Before teaching, she was a jewelry buyer. Even then, she was teaching and training, work that revealed to her a need.
“It was amazing the adults I worked with, the skills they lacked,” she said.
Now in formal public education, her goal is “to teach you something you can take with you the rest of your life to be happy, productive adults. I want them to remember I cared, that I wanted to make a difference.”
For all that, her colleagues and community members named her Smyth County’s Teacher of the Year, a “democratic process,” she said, of e-mailed ballots in each school, elimination of two of each school’s top three teachers, and selection by a committee of a winner from the schools’ final candidates.
“I don’t consider myself to be the best, just one of many,” Hash said.
She said she cried when she learned she was the teacher of the year, and was lost for words except to ask her principal, Steve Miller, if he was sure a mistake hadn’t been made.
“It was such an exciting, rewarding feeling, just to be in the pool with these wonderful teachers.”