Jeannine Rogel retiring after 47 years of teaching

 

MEDINA, Wash.—Asked what they appreciate about teacher Jeannine Rogel, her fifth-grade students agree: She’s no softie. She loves us.

 

To Rogel, those two things are the same thing.

 

“Part of loving kids is to expect the best they can give — and they can give a lot more than a lot of people believe they can,” says Rogel. She proved that in the digital dark ages of 1992 when she had her fourth-graders programming computers, a feat that got national headlines.

 

A throng of grateful former students, families and colleagues will gather on June 3 to celebrate Rogel’s retirement after 47 years of teaching. Speakers will include Katharine Barrett, a former student who went on to be an executive producer at CNN; and John Connors, a former Microsoft chief financial officer who saw Rogel’s achievements from the perspective of a parent.

 

The party will be 2 to 5 p.m. at Bellevue High School. Rogel wants to spread the word to former students from as far back as 1965 when, armed with a new elementary education teaching degree from Washington State University, she confronted her first class of 35 kids – “including three Stevens and three Davids.”

 

No one who knows Rogel would be surprised that she remembers the names of long-ago students. Judy Bushnell, a retired school board member and former teacher evaluator who met Rogel 25 years ago, has visited thousands of classrooms and recalls that Rogel’s was always a magical place.

 

“She covered her basics in the subjects but extended learning to the most complex of concepts, making children think and learn at levels higher than students in most classrooms experience,” Bushnell said. “Her classroom was her domain and she took charge and led.”

 

Rogel, reared in Ellensburg, initially rebelled when her parents urged her to follow in their footsteps and become a teacher. WSU alumni Edward and Dordena (Felton) Rogel were inspirational educators, said their other daughter, Carol Scott-Kassner.

 

“Also, at that point in history, women had few career choices: secretary, stewardess, teacher, nurse,” said Scott-Kassner, who earned a WSU teaching degree a year ahead of Jeannine. She also taught in Bellevue schools and went on to a university teaching career in music education.

 

Faced with her father’s argument that a teaching certificate would ensure a paycheck, Rogel earned the elementary education degree. But she turned down classroom job offers until she met a principal with whom she “clicked.” Then, she was off and running down the career path.

 

Rogel has spent her entire career in the Bellevue School District. When she arrived, it was middle-class and anchored by Boeing Corp, she said. There were still farm fields. Then the software industry was born and has boomed. The community surrounding Medina Elementary, where she teaches now, is solidly affluent.

 

Whatever her students’ backgrounds, Rogel has approached each of them with a single question.

 

“I would come in the fall and ask ‘Who are these children, and what gifts can I bring out?” she said. “It was like mining their little minds.”

 

Of her approach to teaching, she said: “I have three rules. One, respect all. Two, keep your eye on the ball. Three, ‘Not here, not done.’ If you do the work and leave it at home, that’s too bad. You’ll have to redo it.”

 

She fondly recalls 1992-94, when her students were consumed with software programming.

 

The project took off thanks to Rogel’s belief that kids were capable of programming. It thrived thanks to one gifted fourth-grader—now a Google programmer—who was willing to help his classmates. The students had to stay in teams for the whole year, learning to work together as well as write code.

 

Ultimately, the kids saw their educational software packaged on floppy disks by a local firm. When they demonstrated their prowess at a national computer conference of educators, programmers and MIT professors, they received a standing ovation.

A student from that class who recently graduated from law school told her he’d never worked as hard as he did during fourth grade.

 

“It was our total life,” Rogel said of the programming project. She laments that she couldn’t repeat it under today’s more regimented teaching requirements.

 

“The profession has changed a lot. It’s very much dictated by rules from the government about what to teach and when to teach it,” she said. “For most of my career, teachers had student learning objectives. You could reach them any way you wanted. It was creative.”

 

Rogel still finds out-of-the-box ways to excite students, some of them rooted in tradition. Her fifth-graders this year competed to learn Greek and Latin root words, earning “License to Excel” sweat shirts. They mapped transcontinental railroad routes to prepare for a field trip to see a spectacular train set. They wrote persuasive essays in which they took the sides of Patriots or Loyalists in the Revolutionary War.

 

Rogel’s passion for education has extended far beyond her own classrooms. She received a Fulbright Fellowship to do arts research in India. She conducted an action research study and was invited to present her paper, “Cooperative Learning in Anti-Social Students,” at Oxford University in England. A fellowship from the Holocaust Center allowed her to travel to Poland with a Sobibor survivor to study the impact of the Holocaust on the Jews of that region. Inspired by a student’s father, who was from Kenya, she traveled to Africa to help build a school for Maasai students.

 

She took two paid sabbaticals, using one of them to earn a master’s degree in counseling psychology and one to study computers. She taught adults for nine years as a professional development specialist for the Bellevue School District, while spending evenings, weekends, vacations, and summers consulting for universities and state departments of education.

 

Her students call her Jeannine, and often stop for goodbye hugs as they leave for the day. This spring, one of them asked her: “How come you stayed in teaching for 47 years?”

 

“Because I love it and I think it’s important work,” she answered.

 

“You’re really good at it.”

 

“Thank you.”

 

Another boy asked what she is going to do after she retires.

 

“I would like to be involved with kids in some way,” she replied. Not being around students, she added, would be “the hardest thing.”