Making Wild Colts Into Good Horses

Find a job you love, and you'll never work a day in your life - Anonymous
A quote handwritten and posted on Linda Merrill's bulletin board

BY SUSAN DICKERSON
SALISBURY POST

She's taught in East Rowan High's Room 2 for the last 16 years.

The creamy, yellow cinder walls hold up the "Nerd Dogs" poster outside her door, and of course all the dogs are wearing eye glasses held together with tape or paper clips. On a leather necklace, the dogs are wearing a pocket protector full of pens and pencils.

The banner on the other side of her door proudly boasts: "Congratulations! Rowan-Salisbury's Teacher of the Year."

On one of her bulletin boards is the poster: "Complaint Bulletin Board. Please write legibly." And underneath that is maybe a one-inch by one-inch piece of paper.

Before class even starts, the first student comes through the door and Linda Merrill asks: "Lindsey, How are you doing? Are you feeling better?"

"Yeah," is the response she gets.

But that's the kind of concern Mother Merrill shows to her students, a name she gave herself and some of her students call her.

In fact, the accountant turned teacher has been nominated for teacher of the year before, "but I haven't won until this year," she said.

Merrill, the multimedia teacher, doesn't teach your typical lecture, discussion or busy work class. In fact, it's usually student driven.

In fact, her title doesn't do a good job of revealing exactly what she does.

She teaches students how to use the computer to put together presentations.

That's not a real good way of describing it either.

Under the Duke, State, UNC and Wake Forest banners hanging in her room, you'll see students staring at their computers quietly, scrolling down with their mouse, clicking on Internet pictures, pushing the up, down, left and right keys to move through three-dimensional rooms on their computer screens. They are copying, pasting, dragging, saving, listening to computer generated noises trying to find the one they want, and pulling pieces of information together from numerous sources, print, video and Internet.

It's all for the sake of a research presentation, or a creative writing presentation, or maybe just to get familiar with new software.

And scattered around the room, students find stress relievers - those little toys that you flip upside down, and the red liquid drips out to turn the smiley-face wheel.

"You wouldn't believe how much they (the students) use those things," Merrill said. "They work, but they kind of watch them as they work."

And did you know, if you slept eight hours a night for 60 years of your life, you will have slept 25 years of your life away?

"It's a waste," she said. "I'm worried about those things. So I don't do that."

After being asked how much she does sleep, she said five to six hours a night. "I used to not sleep that much," she says, "but I'm getting old."

Dressed in a hunter green pant suit with a deeper green velvet collar and a coordinating hunter green print scarf, Merrill said, "Here, students can do scholarly research and end up with a video project versus a research paper."

She still grades on grammar, technical quality and content, but she also grades on the presentation of the research and the oral presentation.

"Employers tell us they want their employees to have written and oral communication skills," she says. "This course addresses both, and they have a lot of artistic freedom."

Along with her classroom work, she has two planning periods. One for planning and one to work with Robert Basinger, governor of Junior Civitans.

Junior Civitans, if it's possible, is an even greater love than teaching. As the adviser, Merrill helped found East's Junior Civitan organization. Now, East's Junior Civitans are in the top 10 out of all 128 Junior Civitan organizations across the world.

And Basinger is the governor, or chairman, of that international organization.

If that wasn't enough to make her proud, the East chapter is receiving the Governor's award for service on Nov. 30 for one of its programs.

The chapter students work with the Abundant Living Centers, a day care center for the elderly. Students come to the centers and hold Christmas, Easter and Valentine's Day parties. Students also sponsor a resident, and they give them gifts, sit and talk with them and write them.

But don't think she's a pushover.

Ask a few of her students, that attention they give their computers is a must in her class. She's strict. First-year students have to sit in their seats, no drinking or eating around the computers, and you better be working.

But other than, "It's really fun," said junior Kari Fisher. "I like being here. It's really neat. She takes her time out to help everybody at school. She's involved with many people, and helps everybody on the computers."

"She's crazy" said Jennifer Trexler, sophomore. "She's very cool and upbeat. She makes this class fun."

"And if we're good Monday through Friday, she gives us two days off," they say laughingly.

"Yeah, the first week they were in here, it was Friday," Merrill said. "I told them that you're working so hard, I'm going to give you the next two days off. And they said, 'Really and truly?' Then someone said, 'It's the weekend.'|" And she laughs.

She does that a lot, said friend and East counselor Margaret Basinger. "She'll be the first to laugh at her own jokes."

Students also learn pretty quickly that if they have a spelling question, she heads them to the authority.

"Isn't this a wonderful book?" she tells a student wanting to know how to spell tying as she hands the dictionary over.

But having given up a profession that would pay so much more than teaching, Merrill wouldn't go back. She cares too much about her students.

"You've heard the phrase, the wildest colts make the best horses. As we deal with students on an every day basis, there are students who are wild or energetic. They're more demanding, but most of them are going to turn out OK. I see that evidenced here in this community all the time. I'll see a student of mine who was one of those wild colts, and I'll say 'Yep. He was a wild colt, but he's a good horse now. That's the reward you get."

And since she's received her Teacher of the Year honor, she's gotten the congratulations notes.

Including two from State Board of Education Chairman Phil Kirk, also a native from Salisbury.

Those two even went to school together, worked together on the school paper and founded the first teen-age Republican Club together in 1962.

In his second note, Kirk hand wrote: "Just think, if you become the N.C. Teacher of the Year, you will become a member of the state Board of Ed for two years. Don't know if we could survive two from Rowan County."

"I'm going to write him back and tell him he'll just have to resign," she said. Laughing.