EXCELLENCE IN EDUCATION 2018-2019 Secondary Teacher of the Year Carroll Senior High: Eddie Morman
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wo simple words have been the driving force for a certain Carroll Senior High School teacher: Be Better. This is the mantra 2018-2019 Secondary District Teacher of the Year Eddie Morman began telling himself in junior high. With his parents dealing with substance use issues and less than 10th-grade educations, Morman rarely heard the topic of high school or college brought up in his house. “To a poor kid who attended five elementary schools in six years, college was reserved for the elite,” Morman says in his Teacher of the Year application. “Nonetheless, I was determined to ‘be better’ no matter what it was going to take.” Leaving home during his freshman year in high school to move in with a friend, Morman was determined to get his education. He enrolled in the Goodland Boys Home in 1997 and graduated high school in 1999. He made having a college degree a reality when he graduated in 1999 as a double major in history and political science at Ouachita Baptist University. “Every student I interact with, every concept I want my kids to master and every single story I tell all have the same theme woven in-and-out them… ‘Be better,’” Morman says. “Whatever ‘better’ looks like for them… Better than yesterday, better than last year, better than even what they would define as their ‘best.’”
Morman arrived at Carroll Sr. High in 2015 and while there taught US History and AP History as well as serving as the sponsor for CSHS’s Southlake Kids Interested in Leadership (SKIL) program. “My philosophy of teaching is as old as the three R’s, with my personal twist. My three R’s are Relationships = Relevance + Rigor,” he says. “In order for learning to take place, relationships must be fostered. In order for relationships to be fostered, relevance to a teenager’s life is both crucial and critical.” Morman says his philosophy is simple, breaking down what he calls the stereotypical teacher and student relationship. “My job is to teach,” he says. “However, my true job is to inspire, motivate, cultivate and educate without the students seeing me in the traditional ‘sit and get’ a.k.a. ‘I teach - you listen’ manner.” In Morman’s first year of teaching, a veteran teacher approached him and said the three reasons he became a teacher were “June - July - August.” It was then Morman says he decided to “‘be better.’” “I chose then and there to be more than a teacher,” he says. “I chose to become a part of my student’s lives. I chose to have a relationship with them, I chose to invest in them, and I challenged myself to do this in a manner that was unlike the profession had ever seen, heard or thought of before.”
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