Teacher Earns Title As The Best National Award Winner Tough But Inspiring

Cincinnati students who have had Sharon M. Draper for English remember her tough writing tasks and enthusiasm for “Jeopardy,” the quiz show whose format she borrowed to teach about the wives of Henry VIII.

“She made English fun,” recalls Lisa Johnson, who graduated 10 years ago from Walnut Hills High School and still has her dreaded “Draper Paper,” a rigorous, college-level composition required of seniors.

The writing she learned helped Johnson ease her way through courses at Miami University. Draper, on the other hand, never got beyond the tryout to appear on “Jeopardy.”

But Draper has become much too busy to worry about that small disappointment. She’s a published fiction writer and, as of Wednesday, the 1997 “Teacher of the Year.”

The honor, given by the Council of Chief State School Officers and educational publishers Scholastic Inc., means Draper will leave her classroom for a year to be a spokeswoman for education.

She’ll spend much of her time pushing for greater recognition of teachers as professionals, and encouraging young people to enter the field.

“We’re going to need a lot more teachers in the next 20 years as the teachers who are baby boomers start to retire - and we are all going to retire,” she said in an interview. She’s been on the job for 26 years.

More than 20 years ago, Draper taught reading out of a driver education book as a way to draw a surly group of teenagers into the subject. “They were 16 and they wanted to drive,” she recalls. “Once I taught them what they wanted to learn, then I was able to teach them what they needed to learn.”

At Walnut Hills, a selective public school for the college-bound, Draper now moves with ease from Chaucer and Shakespeare to contemporary Maya Angelou.

Those who have taken her classes, whether in the eighth grade or 12th, remember most what she has taught them about writing, and that she is a tough but helpful grader. Seniors who finish the final-year composition wear T-shirts proclaiming, “I survived the Draper Paper.”

For that 10-week exercise, the students submit a topic, then outlines and note cards. The final two to three weeks are devoted to writing.

Draper said there’s a moral as well as a technique to the assignment.

“The fourth quarter, they want to go to the mall, they want to buy prom dresses, they want to count graduation tickets,” she said. “They do not want to go to the library.

“So I send them to the library. I make that last quarter of their education something mean-ingful (stressing the syllable break) and memorable. They do not like it at all and the reason they do not like it is, it’s something demanding and they’re ready to quit.

“They don’t like it, but when they get through they are so proud. And they are so glad.”

Draper’s favorite success story is the bright but troubled young man who cursed her out in class and quit school, but then straightened out his life, asking her for a college recommendation even though she had given him an F.

He returned one day and gave her a rose. He also became a teacher.

“Something that I said or did must have touched him,” she said.