WOHS chemistry teacher retires after three decades

Teresa Yates experienced two full-circle moments in her final year of teaching at West Orange High School — from Turner to Turner and from “Climb Every Mountain” to “Climb Every Mountain,” she said — and it eased her mind about her decision to retire.

Yates spent her first year with Orange County Public Schools teaching physical science at Apopka Middle — and then spent the next three decades educating WOHS students on the nuances of earth and space science, integrated science, biology, and chemistry.

While the classroom topics changed through the years, Yates’ love of teaching and the sense of accomplishment she has felt watching her students succeed has remained steadfast. She enjoys living in Winter Garden and seeing her former students flourish — students like Lucca Scozzafave Goncalves, who asked her to be his confirmation sponsor at church; Jeanmarie Texier, who now is a local obstetrician and gynecologist; and Courtney Haberman, who was her intern and now teaches chemistry at Foundation Academy.

“I’ve made doctors, I’ve made engineers, Lucca is in finance, I’ve made nurses, but I made a science teacher too,” Yates said.

Yates has been named Teacher of the Month and was nominated for Teacher of the Year but said all her accolades are walking around; their accomplishments are her accomplishment.

GENERATIONAL LESSONS

When you teach for 30 years, there’s a good chance you will teach your students’ children too, which has been the case many times. She taught her peers’ children and the neighborhood kids as well; and she had many students who were in her classes for both biology and chemistry.

Yates philosophy is to give her students as much advantage as possible. She gave them notes, made PowerPoint presentations and created a YouTube channel so they could rewatch the problems being solved.

“The best part of teaching is when you teach something like chemistry, which is very difficult, and you know they did not have that knowledge or skill before, and they get it and you know it was you,” she said. “When everyone had a good score (on a test) and the average was 97 percent, and they didn’t know this before they came into the class.”

Student success has been her motivation.

“I do the best job that I can do and create the best I can create, which is my student,” she said. “I do that because at the end of the day, my work product is something to be proud of. And that’s why I consider the students that I taught (to be) my work product.”

SOUL SEARCHING

Yates originally chose accounting as a career and was working for her father’s cabinetry company. She decided accounting was too boring and she didn’t want to spend her life in a cubicle, so she did some soul searching to figure out what she wanted to do. She also was teaching Sunday school at her church and liked the idea of people learning from her, so she switched her major to education.

Yates began her WOHS career in the previous West Orange campus and admits she and her students used to swab the carpeted walls as science lab experiments. She also taught classes at the West Orange Ninth-Grade Center before moving permanently to the current main campus. She spent one year in a portable and said that was a fun year because she and her students could easily move their desks outside and learn under the shade trees.

She taught under 10 principals — beginning with Sarah Jane Turner and retiring with Matthew Turner — and calls that one of two full-circle moments.

All three of her children, Andrew, Parker and Claire, graduated from West Orange and were involved in the band program. Yates said she probably volunteered at every football game and every band event from 2012 to this year, when her daughter graduated.

Yates’ second full-circle moment involved the band. When her oldest son joined the band program in 2008, the first song of the marching band performance was “Climb Every Mountain” from “The Sound of Music.” Fast-forward to Claire’s final band performance last month — the end of the program included a medley of “Sound of Music” tunes, and the last song was “Climb Every Mountain.”

SAILING INTO RETIREMENT

Yates was asked if she was going to cry on the last day of school, and she replied, ‘No, because I still live in this community.’”

She enjoys seeing her former students at the grocery store and in restaurants.

“I like seeing them again and catching up with them again after graduation and seeing what they’ve done,” she said. “For me, that’s my work product. Other people, they make stuff, and when their career is over people say, ‘What is your work product?’ Mine all have names.

I taught about 5,000.”

Yates has no plans to slow down in this next phase in life. She and her husband, George, have booked several trips already that incorporate multiple national parks.

Life as a teacher usually limits travel to the summer months, so she’s excited about the idea of traveling year-round. Their first excursion begins this week in Rome and continues with a 12-day Disney cruise of the Mediterranean followed by a train trip to Paris.

Future vacations will take the Yateses to Hot Springs National Park to see the eclipse and to Glacier National Park next year and on a cruise from Australia to Hawaii in 2025 that will include a stop at the National Park of American Samoa. This will bring their total national park visits to 27. Red pins on a giant wall map in Yates’ craft room mark the parks they have been to.

Yates’ retirement plans include time in her craft room, where she sews, crochets, embroiders and creates.

She wants to learn other languages and currently is teaching herself Italian.

Yates quoted Ecclesiastes 3: There is a time for everything and a season for every activity under the heavens.

“Your hard work should result in a time of joy,” she said. “I love teaching, and I tell people all the time, I’m not done teaching; my curriculum just changed.”

This time, her star pupil is her 18-month-old granddaughter, Kiera, and she will be teaching colors, numbers and ABC’s.

“She’s my motivation for retiring,” Yates said.