Professor Rita Smith, ‘Helping Students Break Out of Their Box’ Yields Success in the Classroom and in Life

Rejecting society's norm, Rita Smith became a nationally recognized and celebrated Educator

FEBRUARY 2023 PODCAST -- This month’s podcast features Professor Rita Smith, a lifelong educator and the 1985 recipient of Time Magazine’s Teacher of the Year Award. Professor Smith’s career as an educator spans 44 years, beginning as a high school teacher and then spending nearly two decades as the chair of the Secondary Education Department at Stonehill College. She recounts for JFY many of the experiences and stories that helped her students find success in the classroom and in their lives.

PODCAST HIGHLIGHTS:

"And we went up and up and up and up [in the elevator] and then the doors just opened and I saw my future world’s largest typing pool. And I said to myself, oh my God, what have I done? [Timestamp: 10:01]

"Well, they [Stonehill College] had been an all male school. Right. And now the Korean War wiped out a lot of those young men. Right. You know, and so they had to take in women. They had to take us in. They had to fill the seats.” [Timestamp: 12:56]

”Breaking out of boxes, getting kids to break out of boxes.” [Timestamp 32:21]

”I established a teacher education program that promoted equity and, people working together and respecting one another.” [Timestamp 40:33]

[Song: 'Keys Of Moon - The Epic Hero' is under a creative commons license Music promoted by Breaking Copyright: https://breakingcopyright.com].

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Today, JFYNetWorks addresses the college readiness disconnect by providing focused blended, hybrid and remote learning programs in high school to help students build the academic skills they need to enter college or technical training earning academic credit. The JFYNetWorks blended program model — infusing specialized online content into the regular curriculum — also facilitates scalability, as the low cost of the online platform can easily be expanded to entire schools.

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