Donia Attidore-Meyers | St. Thomas-St. John District Teacher of the Year Candidate
7th Grade
Bertha C. Boschulte Middle School
If this is a nature verses nurture topic, for me it is a win-win situation.
NATURE: Perhaps genetics played a role in my desire to teach. My mom, Roma Attidore, was a teacher in her home nation of Dominica and her grandfather, William Benjamin, (from France) was a French professor.
As a young child, I recall often pretending to be a teacher. I’d give my younger brother and sister work from outdated public-school textbooks and sit my dolls on the remaining chairs in the living room with opened books in front of them. I recall making stern faces as I checked their work while pretending to be furious at good grades and giving them more challenging work to see if I could stump them. My challenge was to stump them, and their challenge was to not get stumped.
NURTURE: Having a series of outstanding teachers in my years at Julius E. Sprauve School also inspired much of my successful habits. Mr. Elroy Sprauve, Mr. Avelino Samuel, Ms. Ruth Frett, and Ms. Gwendolyn Abramson stood out in my memory as super organized, strong, caring disciplinarians with high expectations. Similarly, my past students will attest to my strong discipline and high expectations. At times, teachers would send class troublemakers to me. I have even had students who were put out of other classes (on the elementary and middle school levels), join my class and pay attention, even though I was not their teacher.
Ms. Joycelyn Stagger, my second-grade teacher, gamified the classroom in the 1980’s with teacher-made games and encouraged us to make our own educational board games, as well. Likewise, I often incorporate games and competition in the classroom, which motivate my students to learn. Mr. James Provost gave short, five-question quizzes on a sheet of paper that had an array of quiz spaces to record many grades at a glance. I absolutely loved it and it motivated me to try to get as many 100s as possible. I incorporated these mini assessments in my classes and my students also enjoy them. As a young athlete, I enjoyed assisting one of my coaches, Terrance “Chino” Chinnery, in teaching others to play softball at some practice sessions in the Creek, St. John (where I was raised). Coach Chino didn’t only teach us to play sports; he also taught us good citizenship on and off the field. I always enjoyed learning and helping others. Good teachers do that. Good teachers teach citizenship skills, as well as their content; enjoy helping others; and always look for ways to learn to improve themselves. It’s difficult to excel in a field where you don’t enjoy what you do.
I believe my greatest contributions include getting others to see that they are capable of more than they believe. Using the aforementioned mini quizzes over the years, I have seen many students who think they are poor students light up at the 100s or passing grades they are not used to getting. Their desire to continue getting those grades drives them to attempt to predict which questions I’ll ask on the next quiz. Once I get them to do that, I throw them off by asking different types of questions. This gets them to pay closer attention to details and thus I develop a challenge-driven environment, as I did with my siblings when I was younger.
One achievement that comes to mind is inspiring other educators to incorporate and diversify use of technology in their classrooms. One summer, within my first four years of teaching (at Emanuel Benjamin Oliver Elementary School), I was asked by Assistant Principal Doris Daniel to assist some teachers in learning to incorporate technology in the classroom, and I did. The teachers were quite grateful, and I was glad that I could help.
Over the years, I continued to assist in sharing how technology can be incorporated in the classroom at my school, in district professional development here and in St. Croix, and as far away as Portland, Oregon. Today, I continue to help others incorporate technology in the classroom. I believe that incorporating technology is vitally important in getting more students interested in learning, not just because many of them spend much of their leisure engaged on their personal devices, or because it helps to facilitate flexible grouping and can addresses the individual needs of each child in a packed classroom, but especially since they are growing up in a world that is becoming increasingly dependent on the use of technology. (When I encouraged a former student to teach his parents some of the technical skills that he learned while in my class, he shushed me and told me that his parents pay him to use those skills to make presentations for family events.)
