Team Member Spotlight

Team Member Spotlight Eric Ball - High School Social Studies Teacher

High School Social Studies Teacher Eric Ball.

Eric Ball has taught social studies at Grain Valley High School for 11 years. He was nominated as the featured teacher for this story and shares his thoughts on teaching and learning.

I want to be for my students what many of my teachers, especially many of my high school teachers, were for me: A teacher who cares and is involved. A teacher who is there, who can be counted on. A teacher who inspires imagination, thought, hope and drive for what students dream, while inspiring them to what they maybe never realized or thought possible. A teacher with certain, specific standards and expectations who holds students accountable to those, both for learning and achieving in the classroom, but also developing responsible and respectable adults and citizens.

Many of my biggest influences growing up at school were my social studies teachers. My high school social studies teacher is who really inspired me to become a teacher in the end. Much of why I teach was from their influence. Early on as a student in high school, I sometimes felt like an analogy I remember from Will Smith’s character on the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air TV show. Smith’s character talked about being a kid trying to roller skate with only one skate - if you could imagine. He then talks about how a person in his life gave him his other ‘skate’ so to speak. I credit my high school social studies teacher with giving me my ‘other’ skate, and from that point, I always wanted to be in a position to be able to do that for a student if needed.

“I want to be for my students what many of my teachers... were to me..." - Eric Ball High School Teacher

I chose Grain Valley for the people. Coach Whitson said it best not too long ago, ‘life is about what you are doing, but as important - who you are doing life with.’ From the citizens of this community who deny nothing to our district or its students, especially when it comes to bond issues and initiatives to provide the best and the essential when educating our students. To the people I work with day to day in the social studies department at the high school. There is a sense of family and community among this department, both in how we love, care and support each other personally and professionally to providing that same sense among our students. There is a reason why social studies classes at GVHS are among the most full in enrollment, and why our classrooms are consistently full

High School Social Studies Teacher Eric Ball

with students before and after school hours; it is because of the sense of caring, love and support for them as people and in their education.

The District has grown leaps and bounds in the decade I’ve been here. Yet even in all the growth I still feel there is a sense of family and community among this our entire district, both in how we love, care and support each other personally and professionally - to providing that same sense among our students.

I chose and believe that social studies is the perfect subject to achieve the reasons for why I teach. It’s why I don’t do ‘dates and dead people’ only in presenting social studies, but try to unpack what is interesting and inspiring about the human story while helping my students (and myself) write our own chapters of that story.

Communication and partnership between parents, students and schools need to continue to change and get stronger. Students today are faced with more choices, options and directions in their learning and education than in anytime in our country. Schools can explain and guide students all they want when it comes to their learning, but if schools can’t do the same for parents and guardians, then it becomes a disservice to the student’s success and achievement in the end. It is essential for our district to continually include our community and all stakeholders in understanding the importance of initiatives such as Standards Based Grading. Grain Valley has, in my past decade here, communicated and included our community in the role they play as the first and foremost emphasis of the importance, attitude and mindset on education, and we need to continue to do so.

Being nominated as a featured teacher makes me feel hopeful - hopeful that my story and work is a worthy illustration of what we all do as a whole in the social studies department at the high school, but also what many of us do and what we are about as teachers and professionals across our building and the entire Grain Valley School District every day. •