Demeanor, creativity earn Teacher of the Year high marks
Published: February 21, 2006
Magic shows and a time travel machine are just as important as books and pencils in Betsy Seymour’s classroom.
The 27-year teacher isn’t the type to just teach math. Instead, she builds on her gifted first-, second- and third-graders’ imaginations, working painless geometry lessons into an origami project, for example, or teaching them to measure perimeters while working in the rose garden outside her classroom.
The Lawton Chiles Elementary School teacher is Alachua County’s 2006 Teacher of the Year, hailed as much for her sweet demeanor with students as she’s praised for her creativity. But Seymour, 49, said she accepted the award only as a representative of a school district “loaded with great teachers” who work as a team.
“Name just about anything in this classroom, and I can tell you who I took the idea from,” Seymour said, calling her curriculum a collection of projects other teachers shared with her over the years.
Sometimes Seymour will dress up in a magician’s cape for her “Abracadabra” unit, in which she teaches students magic tricks involving math problems. Once they’ve mastered the tricks - and the math - the children put on a magic show for their parents.
They learn about historical discoveries in mathematics through their time travel machine. Seymour puts on a strange hat with knobs and an antennae on it, then pretends to take her class back in time to the date of the historical event she’s teaching them about.
And she uses the rose garden for both math and science lessons, teaching the students orienteering techniques in a scavenger hunt; having them test the soil in a laboratory experiment; and shooting a video of them talking about roses. The film is “rented” to each child’s family for a night, so parents can watch the video and write their reaction to it in a “Rosebuddies” journal.
“I want to inspire students to love learning and pursue learning beyond the school day,” Seymour said. “I want to extend their confidence to take on any problem, and to realize they can solve it on their own instead of looking to anybody else.”
Going against her quiet nature
One of Seymour’s longtime co-workers, Tom Lapcevic, said Seymour’s friendliness and soft, almost child-like voice draw children to her.
“It’s just her nature. The kids inherently love her because of her personality. They want to please her because she’s such a nice person,” he said.
The teacher surprised even friends like Lapcevic, however, when she went against her quiet nature and took on the Teacher of the Year post, addressing hundreds of people at a recent awards banquet.
Seymour said she did it in part so she could thank her school and community for supporting her family during her husband’s struggle with cancer. Bud Seymour, also a teacher in the district and a Buchholz High School basketball coach, died in August.
One recent afternoon when the school day ended, third-grader Becky Liao walked into Seymour’s classroom to give her a hug, the last of several that day. Seymour said the same little girl hugged her every day during her husband’s struggle, and it helped her get through it.
“Being at school was therapeutic for me. As a teacher, you always get rewards from your students. But with the younger ones, they really demonstrate it,” she said.
She learned just how much a teacher can affect children’s lives when letters from her husband’s students arrived in their mailbox.
“Kids wanted to let him know what kind of impact he had. We got letters from kids in college, remembering specific words he said to them in the hallway,” Seymour said. “We say things every day, and kids take it to heart. It just reminds us as teachers how important our job is.”
Destined for Gainesville schools
Seymour knew as a little girl that she wanted to be a teacher, but her dad wasn’t thrilled with the idea. She was born in Cheektowaga, N.Y., a Buffalo suburb, and many schools in that area were closing down at the time.
Still, Seymour held on to her dream, teaching children in summer recreation programs during high school, then majoring in education and minoring in art at the State University of New York at Geneseo. Hoping to show her father she could get a job, after all, when she graduated, Seymour applied for every opening posted on the school’s career board.
“Floral City, Florida, was the first place that called me. It was a town with one traffic signal, one kindergarten class,” Seymour recalled. In fact, every grade up to sixth had only one class, and all those job positions were full. The school needed a physical education teacher and an art teacher.
Her teaching degree might have helped Seymour, then 21, get that first teaching job, but it was her art minor and her expertise in synchronized swimming that sealed the deal. She taught 10 physical education classes a day on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays she taught art classes.
After a year in Floral City, Seymour had had enough. She packed her belongings into her red Ford Maverick and started the long drive back to New York.
She stopped along the way to visit a friend in Gainesville, and by chance she met Bud Seymour at the Florida Theater. The two corresponded with each other after she returned to New York, and when she got her next job offer for a position in Lecanto, Fla., she thought of Bud Seymour and decided to take the job. The next year, she took a job in Alachua County at Duval Elementary School, but lost it two weeks into the school year after enrollment dropped too low.
Seymour was devastated, but the district soon placed her in another school, Littlewood Elementary, where she taught for 19 years. During her time at Littlewood, she “fell in love” with Gainesville and with Bud Seymour. She married Seymour in 1984 and had two sons, Zach and Tyler, now ages 19 and 14.
When Chiles Elementary School opened in 1999, Betsy Seymour decided to move to the new school with several co-workers and then-Littlewood Principal Georgeann Mullally, who’s still the principal of Chiles.
Mullally said Seymour brings a lot to the southwest Gainesville school.
“She is so sensitive to the needs of the kids, and she just loves every single one of them,” the principal said. “She sets very high expectations for them, but she also helps them to attain that.”
‘Inspired by my peers’
Seymour’s creativity seeps into the hallway outside her classroom, with her well-known, hand-drawn caricatures taped to the walls. Inside the room, star cutouts dangle over the part of the room she calls her time machine, while valentine hearts, an exercise in symmetry, hang by the windows.
During class recently, third-grader Riley Myers said Seymour is “one of the best teachers I’ve ever had. She’s very sweet and never gets real mad.”
Her classmate, Taylor Christian, 8, added, “She has a nice, low voice and she teaches until everybody knows what she taught. She says if there’s a problem, solve it in a new way.”
Seymour is one of two gifted teachers for first- through third-graders at Chiles. The other, who happens to be Taylor’s mother, Dagni Christian, teaches an identical curriculum that they plan as a team.
“That’s why I love what I do so much,” Seymour said. “Because you surround yourself with other people that are so giving and compassionate and share ideas with each other.
“I get inspired by my peers and the other teachers I work with. Receiving the Teacher of the Year award is an honor, but a humbling honor,” she said.
As the county’s Teacher of the Year, Seymour will represent the district in the Florida Department of Education’s state-level Teacher of the Year competition for 2007. She’ll write essays about her work as a teacher, which will be considered alongside essays from representatives for the state’s other 66 districts. The state teacher of the year will be announced in the summer.
If you enjoyed this good news Subscribe to Good News Blog
Share this
To share this simply copy and paste one of the below URL's: