Failed math in 9th grade. Became teen mom. Here’s how she became Teacher of the Year
She failed math as a ninth-grader. But not only did Dacia Irvin become a math teacher, she was named the 2019 Teacher of the Year for the Muscogee County School District on Thursday.
And there’s another part of her background that could have defined her and determined a different destiny: After graduating from Kendrick High School in 1999, Irvin got pregnant and became a single, teenage mother.
In an interview with the Ledger-Enquirer at Baker Middle School, where she teaches math, Irvin discussed how she overcame those hurdles, the lessons they taught her and how they help her teach her students.
‘It was terrifying’
Irvin wasn’t sure what she wanted to do after graduating from high school — other than attend college — but becoming a mother then certainly wasn’t in her plan.
“It was terrifying,” she said. “It’s terrifying anyway when you graduate high school because, all of a sudden, you’ve got to be an adult. But now, I’ve got to be an adult and a parent.”
Irvin recalled thinking, “Oh, my gosh. I’ve got this kid. I’ve got to choose a career. I’ve got to do something.”
Her parents were supportive, but she insisted on living by herself. She worked at SunTrust as a bank teller. Then, while she was studying at Columbus Technical College to become a certified child-care provider, an instructor made a life-changing impact on her. Irvin forgot the instructor’s name, but she clearly remembers what the instructor said and how that made her feel.
One day, the instructor told Irvin, “You need to be a teacher.”
Looking back, Irvin said, “I didn’t have faith in myself at that age. I was like, ‘I don’t know. That just sounds really hard. I don’t think I can do that.’ ”
After earning her associate’s degree from Columbus Tech, she worked at St. Luke’s preschool for about three years. That experience made her realize, she said, “Maybe I can do this. If I can teach 2-year-olds, then surely I can teach elementary students.”
So she enrolled at Troy University and earned a bachelor’s degree in early childhood education in 2009. She taught at Dimon Magnet Academy from 2009-14 and at Lonnie Jackson Academy from 2014-16. She has been teaching at Baker since 2016. In 2018, she earned a master’s degree in middle grades math from Columbus State University.
“It took someone to see something that I didn’t see in myself,” Irvin said.
‘I had the model’
Irvin grew up with two younger siblings in a two-parent household until her parents divorced when she was in middle school. Although they married as teens, both her parents are college graduates. Her mother is an advocate for victims of domestic violence and her father, retired from the Air Force, is a counselor for children from military families. They continued to emphasize the importance of getting an education.
“I had the model,” she said.
She recalled what her father told her when she disclosed her pregnancy: “It’s never what happens. It’s always how you react to it. No matter what the circumstance is, what are you going to do now? That’s always the question. So don’t wallow in this uncertainty. Just know what’s the next step.”
Irvin paused and added with a smile, “And I’ve lived that.”
Although she hasn’t shared that part of her background with students, she acknowledged they might ask her about it if they read this story. Irvin said she would respond in a way similar to her father’s advice.
“Always, always, always, always find the lesson in that and grow from it,” she would tell her students. “For me, it led me to this path, because I’m not certain I would have been a teacher. It could have taken me forever to grow up and think about what I needed to do.”
She added, “My experience has taught me how to connect with these students and understand where they’re coming from, as well as their parents, because a lot of them are young parents that don’t understand or know or are just as confused and scared.”
Irvin, however, has revealed to her students another potentially embarrassing part of her background — which she has turned into a life lesson for them: Despite getting A’s and B’s in her other classes, she failed math in ninth grade.
That was at Spencer High School, before her mother remarried and her family moved into Kendrick’s attendance zone as she became an 11th-grader. As a senior, she made up those math credits and graduated on time by putting in more effort, she said.
“But I just memorized math,” she said. “I didn’t understand it. … When I grew up learning math, it was just a bunch of rules. The type of person I am, I wanted to know why that happens.”
The breakthrough came at Columbus Tech, where an instructor showed her a different way of thinking about adding multiple numbers.
“They always tell you to just carry it to the next (column),” she said. “But I can’t have 11 ones, so I’ve got to bring a 10 over to the 10s place. Right now, that’s like, ‘Duh.’ But back then, I didn’t know why. She took the time to tell me why.”
Then, when she started teaching at elementary school, Irvin attended a math collaborative training at Columbus State University.
“They opened my eyes to all of the conceptual understanding, what happens behind math: why we add the way we add, why we regroup the way we regroup, what it all means,” she said.
Now, she tells her middle-schoolers, despite failing math as a ninth-grader, “I kept working, and I kept working, and it made sense. As long as you continue to work and try and push — and I’m going to help you do that — if you have any questions, ask, because that’s when it starts to click.”
Irvin equates the situation to sports.
“When you first learn to play basketball,” she asks her students, “were you able to do it? You had to continue practicing.”
Principal’s perspective
Ramona Horn, a 20-year educator in MCSD, is in her fourth year as Baker’s principal. Horn, who previously was the principal at Lonnie Jackson Academy, was impressed by Irvin’s effectiveness there and recruited her to teach at Baker in 2016.
“I know her work ethic, I know her passion for students, I know her personality as an educator, and it was all the things I wanted for my students here at Baker,” Horn said.
Horn described what that looks like when she observes Irvin teaching.
“When you see the expertise she brings to the classroom and how she provides supportive instruction to the students, it just wows you,” Horn said.
Horn knows Irvin communicates well with her students when she hears them “use the content-specific language, how they support each other. It’s really a classroom community. … They don’t feel intimidated to ask for help. They feel empowered in that classroom.”
The principal also sees Irvin “rooting for the underdog.”
“She knows that the students we often serve, it’s a heavy lift,” Horn said. “It’s not meant for everyone. And her passion for the work she does with students that are at high risk, it just shines in everything that she does.”
Baker is one of six MCSD schools among the 104 lowest-performing in the state. Being on the 2018 Turnaround Eligible Schools list means they may receive state intervention and possibly state takeover if they don’t improve their three-year average on the College and Career Ready Performance Index from the state’s bottom 5 percent.
Irvin balks at Baker being labeled a “failing” school.
“We have work to do, but no teacher in this building is failing, and no student is failing in that sense,” she said. “I mean, we show up every day, armed with the idea that we are going to push them ahead. … I see such different students at the end of the year than I saw at the beginning of the year. There’s no failure in that. I don’t care what algorithm or what the state says or what anybody else says. I know my kids, and I know that they’re anything but failures.”
So being the district’s Teacher of the Year, Irvin added, shows Baker “we don’t fail here. … No, we don’t have these amazing test scores that blow through the roof. But we have heart, we have compassion, we have so much more, that there’s not a test out there that can measure it.”
Irvin, now with three children and engaged to be married in June, appreciates the congratulations she has received since she was announced as the winner.
“I have gotten so many emails and text messages and Facebook posts,” she said. “It’s so hard to keep up with, but it’s amazing. A lot of people came up to me after and said how much they were rooting for me, some people I didn’t even know.”
Asked why she think that was the case, Irvin said, “Some of them said it was because the south side doesn’t always get the best press, and it’s awesome to see somebody on that side of town is working so hard for our children.”
Irvin not only is the first MCSD Teacher of the Year from Baker but the first one from any middle school in the district since Amy Willis in 1995 at Arnold Middle School.
Accountability system
As MCSD’s Teacher of the Year, Irvin is now a public spokeswoman about the profession. Even in her acceptance speech, she made it clear that one of the changes she wants to see in education is the way success is measured.
Asked more specifically during her interview with the Ledger-Enquirer, Irvin said the state’s accountability system shouldn’t have a one-time test in the spring, with results compared to the previous year. Instead, she said, the performance of students, teachers, schools and districts should be measured by how much progress they make on a standardized test administered at the start of the school year then again at the end of the school year.
“I’d just like to see testing done in a way that measures not only growth but also acceleration,” she said.
So she suggested three different kinds of standardized tests: one for students who scored above grade level the previous year, one for students who scored at grade level the previous year and one for students who scored below grade level the previous year.
Such a system hasn’t been implemented, Irvin said, “because teachers aren’t in charge. Teachers are told what to teach and how to teach and what it should look like by people who may have never seen my students. They don’t know what my students are experiencing. They don’t know that, when they go home, they don’t have anyone to help them with homework. So, of course, they’re a little behind. Once they practice whatever they practice in my classroom that hour, they don’t think about it again. They have so many other things on their mind, so many other things as a middle-schooler in general, I mean, there are a thousand things they’re thinking about other than their education.”
This story was originally published April 27, 2019 at 3:34 PM.
