There’s always something happening below the surface in Flora Fortune’s Columbus High School biology class.
After 19 years in education, a teacher develops her own style, plying facts and fun in equal measure. It’s a challenge, especially in state-tested subjects like biology, because pressure to cram massive quantities of information into the school day can amp the intensity and quell the enthusiasm.
But Fortune has loved science since she was knee-high to a tadpole, growing up in Lowndes County and absorbing her father’s passion for the outdoor world. By the fifth grade, she knew she wanted to be a teacher, and by the time she graduated from Motley High School in 1979, she was certain she would pursue either education or nursing as a career path.
Instead, she joined the United States Army, where she spent nearly five years and became airborne-qualified, making her possibly one of only a handful of biology teachers in the nation who can dissect a frog or parachute from a plane with equal aplomb.
Still, science and teaching kept calling her name, so she enrolled at Mississippi University for Women and earned her bachelor’s degree in biology.
Today, as new students file past her desk, they probably won’t take much note of the flourishing ecosystem in the classroom sink, but later in the semester, Fortune will lead them outside, down to a pond near the high school. There, they will gather snails, minnows, small fish, water bugs and other creepy-crawlies and bring them back to make their own ecosystem in a bottle.
Students who start out afraid of all that slithers, hops or squirms often end up having the most fun of all with the lab activity, Fortune says. They might enlist the aid of a friend to help them catch a frog, but they’re still tasked with getting the thing into its container, an exercise in patience which can sometimes resemble a scene from Mark Twain’s “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.”
Once the creatures are tucked away in their temporary glass prisons, the students have a new mission: Keeping their ecosystem alive. For two weeks, they become intimately involved in the cycle of life, getting a front row seat to the inner workings of the natural world.
It’s an eye-opening experiencing for this generation’s tech-savvy, Internet-driven high-schoolers, many of whom have never stopped to notice a tadpole or dragonfly. Vice versa, technology and social media enrich the classroom. When examining hair follicles and stem cells under the microscope, more than a few iPhones inevitably end up pressed against the eyepiece as students become engrossed in capturing these new worlds and sharing them with their friends.
Sunday night, Fortune admitted she had a slight fluttering of excited anticipation about today’s start of school. Every year, there’s a new set of students to meet, and she enjoys getting to know them, watching them compete with one another, helping those who are struggling.
When their day ends, her work typically continues another two to three hours as she prepares for the next day. It’s part of being a good teacher, she says. When you love what you do, you devote the time it takes to do it well. When you love where you work, it helps also, and Fortune is unabashed in her praise for her colleagues and the “awesome” school she calls home.
“It’s a lot of work, but it’s a lot of joy,” Fortune says of her teaching career. “It’s not always fun, but the end result is always a great thing. When you’ve worked hard with a student to get them where they want to go, and you’ve struggled together and you’ve made it, it’s always a good thing.”
Carmen K. Sisson is the former news editor at The Dispatch.
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