MORGANTOWN — The West Virginia Summit for Educational Excellence wrapped up Wednesday in Morgantown with a day that was all about high-tech delivery systems.
Well, that’s how it started out, at least.
Then Toni Poling stepped up to deliver keynote remarks.
She spoke during the luncheon held in honor of the more than 1,000 school teachers from across the region who came to town for the summit.
At that podium, in a conference room at the Morgantown Waterfront by Marriott Hotel, the heart of a teacher simply blipped over the high-tech.
No question.
Poling was named West Virginia’s Teacher of the Year for 2017.
It was her heart, and the collective heart of all her teachers, she said, who helped her make a classroom career.
Poling, who teaches Advanced Placement English classes at Fairmont Senior High School in Marion County, was a word-kid from way back.
Even if she didn’t know it at first.
Of lizards and lawyers
As a little girl, she was obsessed with big dinosaurs.
“So, I decided I wanted to be a paleontologist,” she said.
“Now, mind I you, I was a kid who didn’t like being outside or getting dirty, which is what paleontologists do.”
Still, a dream was a dream. So, what did she do?
She read every book in her school library about dinosaurs.
However, because she was a kid (and plans change when you’re a kid) she moved on from the lumbering beasts — and decided she wanted to roam the earth instead as a high-priced lawyer.
So, what happened next?
“I started reading John Grisham books,” she said, as her audience laughed. Grisham is the Mississippi lawyer who really wanted to be a mystery writer.
That dream lasted a while, she said — “Because he wrote a lot of books.”
Mary Frame delivers the verdict
Actually, it lasted until her senior year of high school when her English teacher, Mary Frame, asked her what she wanted to do with her life.
“I told her I wanted to be a lawyer,” Poling said.
Her favorite teacher peered over her signature, large-framed eyeglasses to venture a query: Why a lawyer?
The senior started prattling about money and glamorous, high-profile cases — “I had the idea it would be like a combination of Matlock and Scooby-Doo,” she said.
When Poling told her that she read all the dinosaur books, then all of the Grisham novels, Frame did something else.
She laughed.
“It was this husky laugh she had. She said, ‘Toni, you don’t want to be a lawyer. You want to be a lawyer in a book.’ What you really want to be is an English teacher.’”
Call it a case of the teacher throwing the book at the lawyer — who wasn’t.
Poling realized then that she was about words, ideas and books. She had been all along.
A caring teacher saw something in her, she remembered. Something that was hers.
“Mrs. Frame told me I could, and I did,” she said.
Show of hands
And when the bell rings next month for the first day of school, Poling said she’ll do what she does every year on the first day: She’ll create the environment and establish the beachhead.
That is, she’ll conjure a place where a shy kid won’t be afraid to raise his hand.
A place where an unsure kid won’t be afraid to attempt an idea an essay, because he’ll know his teacher will be his literary anchor.
She knows what it’s like to be unsure. Her first day as a student teacher was Sept. 11, 2001.
Steven Paine, West Virginia’s Superintendent of Schools, heard the waterfall of applause from the hallway as she finished up her remarks.
“There are a lot of good people in that room,” he said.
