Minnesota Teacher of the Year

The selection process for Teacher of the Year in Minnesota, from start to finish, runs for about five months. Over the course of this time, the field of candidates is narrowed to a group of approximately ten finalists. The culmination of the process is a weekend event in which one Teacher of the Year is selected from the finalists. This weekend essentially is broken down into three parts: an orientation reception on Friday evening; interviews with the selection panel on Saturday; and the Teacher of the Year Banquet on Sunday afternoon.

To be honest, in the week before the weekend, I was fairly stressed out about the whole Teacher of the Year process. This stress wasn’t at all from concerns about winning or losing the award: being named a finalist was so far beyond my expectations that I was fine with any outcome. No, the sole reason for my stress can be summed up on one word: interview.

On the Saturday of the weekend, each candidate has a 30-minute interview with a 22-member selection panel consisting of various community leaders. You have no idea what they will ask. You have no idea who they are, but you do know that a few of them are going to be past winners of the Teacher of the Year award. The mystery behind the interview left me feeling as if I were going to walk into a gloomy, candlelit room filled with brooding, hooded figures who would proceed to grill me on arcane educational facts, such as whether Maslow was left-handed, or who was the secretary of education under President Van Buren. I could imagine them scribbling angrily when I would miss an answer.

In the days leading up to the weekend, I found myself waking up earlier and earlier each morning. One night, I woke up in a sweat from a dream in which the panel members were asking me questions, but I couldn’t hear anything they said. I had to ask them to repeat the question, over and over. Yikes.

So it was with some apprehension that I pulled in to the parking lot at the Northland Inn and Conference Center, the host for this year’s event. The time was 5:15 p.m., and the Friday reception was set to start in fifteen minutes. For the sake of brevity, I’ll skip the details of the Friday event, but I can tell you it was a great relief to get the ball rolling, and great fun to meet the other finalists, their spouses/friends, the program coordinators, and Lee-Ann Stephens, the 2006 Teacher of the Year. Everyone was so outgoing, welcoming, and engaging that the three-hours flew by. By the end of the reception, a lot of the tension was gone. It was also comforting to hear that the other finalists were equally stressed about the Saturday interview.

After the event, I said goodbye to my wife, who went home to take care of our two children. I went up to my hotel room, and now I was alone. In the quiet, the word came screaming back, bigger, darker, and closer than ever before: INTERVIEW! The program coordinators tell you at the reception not to be nervous about the interview, that the selection panel is looking forward to meeting you, and that the process is a lot of fun. While this is nice to hear, I was getting flashbacks to my childhood, when I would be standing in Dr. Dalton’s office as he prepared a penicillin shot. Of course he would tell me, “This won’t hurt at bit.”

And of course it always hurt, a lot.

(Here is the link to Part II)