Chad Morris who is a Student Enrichment Specialist at Southwest Arkansas Education Cooperative is a Hope native who when he was an older teenager had no idea he would eventually land in education for a career. In fact, he wanted to go into the field Shaun White would dominate.
“Coming out of high school, I would have been the last person that you would have ever expected to be a teacher,” Morris said. “I used to worry my dad to death because my plans for after high school was I was going to be a professional snowboarder here in Hope, Arkansas. That was my plan.”
Morris said he was not a good student and spent time trying different roles, at one time even becoming an Emergency Medical Technician. But when he helped with his younger brother’s basketball team as a coach, he thought he could see a viable path.
“[I] thought, I'm going to go into coaching,” Morris said. “And so I went back to school after a hiatus at Henderson, and kind of got interested in maybe looking at coaching … We had to observe for a week at a preschool that was on campus there at Henderson. And midway through, I was just kind of like, ‘Oh no, I'm going to be a teacher. This is what I'm supposed to do.’”
Most teachers, Morris said, describe receiving a calling to enter the profession. He joked that this had to be so because what normal person would suddenly decide to take care of 27 children they aren’t related to? But for Morris this was very much the case, as evidenced by his 16 years teaching at Hope Public Schools, then teaching at Spring Hill for three, then working at SWAEC for seven.
When it comes to subject matter, Morris has roamed among the disciplines. “I was kind of an oddity at my time. And when I first started off, I was an elementary teacher, fourth grade … We taught all subjects. And when I kind of wanted to change--I'm a huge history buff--and so my sister-in-law's mother called me. She was a secretary at Spring Hill. And she said ‘Hey, we got a Social Studies job open for fifth and sixth.’”
During his time teaching Social Studies, he became persuaded by his wife that pursuing a Master’s degree would be a good idea. He considered specializing in counseling, because of an urge to help children who had been through traumatic situations. But then he began to learn more about another educational field.
“When I started reading about gifted education, I thought ‘Wow, this is cool, the way kids learn.’ Because I didn't learn like everybody else when you told me, this is how to memorize your multiplication facts. I wasn't a memorizer,” Morris said. Instead of testing himself over and over in remembering times tables, he found a way to determine the answer to the math problems that teachers would tell him not to use.
“Sometimes in school, a lot of times, especially back then, it was ‘Hey, you caught a fish, but you didn't show your work. So throw it back.’ So it was kind of one of those. Wow, that fascinated me. So I ended up getting my masters in Gifted and Talented and was the GT specialist here for a while, and then now I'm the Student Enrichment specialist,” Morris said.
His job now is in helping schools identify students with a high capacity for problem-solving. These students, Morris said, can come from any economic or social background. While schools are becoming better at identifying these students, it remains a challenge, especially with students with aptitudes academic testing doesn’t always catch.
“When I was at Spring Hill, I had a young man in my class who had an IEP [Individualized Education Program, which are documents laying out an educational plan for a special education student] that he had a reading disability. But I walk over and he's got a copy of The Silmarillion reading it. And he is probably in chapter 12.” The Silmarillion is a book by Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien outlining the mythological background of his Middle Earth setting (and beyond). It’s known for its density posing difficulties for most adult readers.
“It's all about interest. If you're interested in it, you can make it happen,” Morris said. “And he wrote me reports on it and everything else. He could tell me verbally what was in there. There's no movie about The Silmarillion. There's just this book which sets up Tolkien lore forever. That's where we need to be headed in education. Let's connect to what they know, connect to what their interest is.”
As for his own mentors, Morris said they’re now his neighbors. “Sally Short was my teacher, who lives in my neighborhood now and I wave at her all the time. She just made a difference, just the fact that she went the extra mile for me.”
As for the other mentor he named, there’s some dispute over exactly what grade she taught Morris. “I say she was my third-grade teacher, but she says she was my fourth-grade teacher, and that was Carolyn Aslin … She lives across the street from me now too. … She was one of the first teachers that I had that I thought knew what my situation was growing up, because she went to school with my dad, and they were friends, so I knew whatever I pulled, my father was going to find out about it. So I think I probably took that year of elementary school a little bit better,” Morris said.
He also credits his father who told him that it did not matter what work Morris wanted to do, as long as he did it with the best of his ability. “He was an x ray technician, and so he worked in Radiology at the hospital. He was probably the first person in our family to actually get some kind of degree straight out of high school. … So that was my inspiration to do stuff like that,” Morris said.
Surely the counsel from his father to work hard at whatever he tried translated to his being part of the Hope Superband, too. I knew Morris as a dynamo on the tri-toms when I was a part of the Governor’s Cup-winning marchers in the fall of 1986. It was surprising to hear that when he graduated, he thought his time as a musician was over.
Yet he has kept at it. He said playing in a threesome with Trey Johnson and Gerren Helms helped with earning money while in college. I have seen him at the drum kit for at least two rock band appearances in Hope with Jeff Madlock on bass, another Superband veteran who Morris said has been an encourager to keep up his chops. “I’ve never stopped since. Like I said, it's one of those things, I guess I could call it a gift. It was just one of those things that I've always taken for granted and has always been there for me.”
Asked to describe the future of his specialty, Morris said that while at present there is an emphasis on acceleration of gifted students, that is the placement of the student in learning situations that will challenge their abilities, not necessarily grade-skipping, he would like to see, as Morris put it, “a bigger net” to catch more students who would thrive if challenged beyond their grade level in particular subjects they’re interested in.
Morris used examples to explain what kinds of students gifted programs should start including now. “You've got a kid that has trouble, who struggles with dyslexia and struggles with reading, but numbers just come to him naturally. So you'll see him with lower grades and literacy, and he perfect scores in math. Are we not going to say that kid's gifted? Sure that kid's gifted. Or if we have a kid that doesn't do well academically in school, but he's learned the violin, or she's learned the violin, or she can paint from memory, that's the challenge,” he said.
He also said that teachers can sometimes see a student in terms of their socioeconomic status or their grasp of English, but not take into account the possibility of their being gifted. “If we have a child that comes to our school that does not speak English, well, [it used to be thought] they can't be gifted. They sure can be gifted. Because what if you gave them the test in their native language? They may blow it out of the water.”
The identification of giftedness and then the resources to challenge that student after identification requires, Morris said, for teachers to become students themselves, to dispense with older approaches. “In education, sometimes we get kind of stuck in this rut of sitting in straight rows and raising your hand if you need to go to the bathroom. And read pages one through 50 by Friday. I don't think our kids nowadays learn like that, and we have some great teachers out there that have realized that … They have modified everything they can.”
Perhaps it had to do with the date of our interview being near May 4th or seeing all the ads for Andor Season 2 but I noticed the décor in Morris’ office looked to have come from a very recognizable campaign to destroy the Death Star. “Everybody has their comfort zone, and I think that's mine,” Morris said. “Up to last month, I had a that cabinet right there that we had a special display built for all my 1977-1978 original Kenner Star Wars action figures. The only reason why I don't today is because I had a guy contact me and he said, ‘Hey, you want to get rid of those?’ I said, ‘I can't get rid of those. They’re my childhood.’ He said, ‘Will you get rid of them for such and such and I said, ‘Let me help you pack these up.’”
But many posters and keepsakes remain that evoke George Lucas’ saga of empire and rebellion among distant planets. As an example of the way the series inspires ideas in our everyday lives, Morris explained that his wife Monica had heard on the radio a report on an intelligent limb prosthetic enabling fine movement after the loss of a hand. “You can't tell me that that guy, the the dude that started inventing this was not inspired by looking at Star Wars,” Morris said.
“It takes inspiration with a lot of people,” he continued. “And whether you get it from a classmate or a parent or a galaxy, far, far away, I'm glad we have it.”
