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The McGlothlin Awards for
Teaching Excellence
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The
2002 McGlothlin Awards for Teaching Excellence
Blue Ridge PBS and a panel of distinguished judges from the region's education community congratulate the winners of the
2002 McGlothlin Award for Teaching Excellence—two prizes of $25,000.00 each. The McGlothlin Awards, established in March 2000 by the McGlothlin Foundation, are among the largest awards for the recognition of teaching excellence in the United States. A stipulation of the awards is that $10,000.00 of the $25,000.00 prize is to be used for international travel to broaden the thinking and experience of the winning teachers, further enhancing their excellence as professional educators in a global society.
Ben
Bazak, Patrick Henry High School,
Roanoke, Virginia
 Ben
Bazak brings a wealth of experience
and expertise to his
classroom. A teacher for over
20 years, Ben has had a wide variety
of professional duties including
teaching secondary math at schools
in Athens, Greece and Vienna,
Austria, working as a division wide
secondary math coordinator,
school-wide technology coordinator,
soccer coach, and Mathematics
Chairperson. But what keeps
him coming back year after year are
his students.
Ben establishes personal
relationships with his students, who
continue to seek him out for advice
and guidance even after
graduation, With his wide
experience and the high regard that
others have for him, Ben has had
plenty of options during the course
of his career, but in his own words,
"There is no other place I
would rather be than
teaching." He is
currently teaching Algebra, A.P.
Calculus and A.P. Statistics.
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 Ben
used his
travel stipend to visit sites in
the ancient Mediterranean world to
recreate how mathematicians in
Egypt, Greece and Italy calculated
the circumference of the earth,
designed aqueducts, and moved large
boats. He communicated
electronically with students in
Southwest Virginia as he traveled,
thereby making his own trip useful
to learners back home. Find
out more about his travels... |
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Wade Whitehead,
Crystal Spring Elementary,
Roanoke, Virginia
 Although
Wade Whitehead comes from a family
of teachers, his parents asked him
to give some thought to considering
other, more lucrative and
prestigious careers. He did,
and then became a teacher
anyway. He says he knows the
decision was the right one, and a
long list of honors and awards
justifies his choice. Wade
approaches the classroom with gusto,
and enjoys applying the principles
of learning that he has studied in
post-graduate work. He says he
enjoys being privy to the clusters
of information that generations of
teachers before us did not have, and
applying it in his class. It
is this interest in the way
education works that led Wade to
undergo the rigorous National Board
Certification.
Wade has also helped train other
teachers in his division and at
national conferences, and last year
taught a group of senior citizens
from the neighborhood around the
school how to use computers.
Many of them had lived near the
school for years but had never been
inside. He says that working
with students, teachers and
community members inproves his skill
as a teacher and enhances his
effectiveness.
Mr. Whitehead plans to use his
teaching award to travel to Rome to
stand in the shadows of the Coliseum
and tour Pompeii so that he can
bring back a first hand account of
the ancient world for his
students. He then plans to
create a web site that would be
available to anyone teaching about
the roots of western civilization.
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Special thanks go to Tom McGlothlin and the McGlothlin Foundation for
making this important recognition of teaching excellence possible. The McGlothlin
Awards for Teaching Excellence are
administered by Blue Ridge PBS's Education
Services Department.
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