In observance of National Teacher Appreciation Week, swark.today is featuring profiles of area teachers on each day of the business week.
Hope High Business teacher Matha Wake said her goal is to prepare students for the real world of possibly running their own companies.
She is amply prepared to do so, having started her own day care business and seen it through its first three years, when she “worked sunup to sundown.” She tells them, “It’s not easy. At all. You’re going to have to work for it.
“It takes the startup costs, the different laws and regulations you’ve got to go by. [Inspectors] will come in and they’ll measure everything, especially in older buildings. Then I tell [my students] the first five years will take a lot of your life.”
It was when she was running her daycare business that she heard the calling to her next career: “I had one department for four and five year olds. I would go in there and help the lady that I hired. That’s when my heart hit, when I started teaching them. I really enjoyed it. I never thought of being a teacher in high school.”
Moving from business ownership to education allowed Wake to retain her interest in business but concentrate more on raising her son than she could as a sunup-to-sundown working business owner. “I would be at work as a teacher and love being in the business area. I got . . . time off with my son. It was God’s way.”
Wake returned to college to take education classes, receiving a Bachelor’s from Henderson State and a Masters from Texas A&M. She pursued business education “because I had more knowledge and experience” in that area, she said. That experience would prove handy.
“When I teach any of my subjects—I teach a lot of different subjects—I think the kids learn more from experience.” Among the classes she teaches are Business Management which is “where I put a lot of my day care experience in.” She also teaches Accounting, another class that incorporates her business experience.
Survey of Business, Wake says, is “more like a technology class, Microsoft Word, Excel. I tell them that’s very important because this generation, this century everything is technology.”
Sometimes in that class she gives the students an idea of how technology has evolved from when she was their age. “When I had my first phone, it was like this big,” she said, holding her hands about half a foot apart.
In one way, though, her students’ ease with smartphone technology can be hampering. “Some of these kids . . . [they] can type but they use their thumbs. I go into a program that’s on the internet to teach them [to type]. But when they start, I have to tell them typing like that is not actually typing.”
If students want to advance as far as to earn employer-respected credentials in certain essential business software, because of Wake’s classes, they can. “I get them certified for Microsoft Word, Powerpoint, Quickbooks. . . . When you want to go off to college, it’ll get you a step up and can replace one of those early classes you don’t need,” she said.
Wake says she also teaches the more timeless skills of balancing one’s own checkbook as opposed to relying exclusively on a bank’s debit card and online banking. “Technology can crash,” she tells them. She points to such historical tech hiccups as the 9/11 attacks, which disrupted many customers’ ability to access to their bank accounts, and to stock market crashes caused by technical glitches.
As a look around her classroom attests, Wake likes her students to take on projects that allow them to bring their individuality to the assignment. Right now, she is displaying two examples of designs of the layout of banks that her students have created. Of the projects completed, she said, “They’re all different. But they got me everything I need, all the different offices I need, the reception area. I tell them everything has a different visual. There’s a lot of different designers in the world that use their imaginations. I always want [my students] to use their own imaginations.”
She takes measures on the first day of a new class to start the process of building rapport with her students, using learning questionnaires to get an idea of each student’s strengths and weaknesses and a personality questionnaire, so she can become more aware of each student’s quirks and interests. These help Wake “decide how I am to present throughout the semester.”
As an example of how this has paid off, Wake describes an instance when she drew on the time she spent learning about the school’s sports teams to engage a shy student in conversation about something they had in common.
In the end, though, such measures are worth the time, because, before any teaching can take place, Wake says, “If you don’t have that bond with the student, they’re not going to learn from you.”
