THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, April 10, 1995 TAG: 9504100025
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DAVE MAYFIELD
STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 94 lines
Orlena Lewis fiddled with her eyeglasses and shifted a bit anxiously in her seat. Tiny beads of perspiration broke out on her forehead. It was steamy inside Joseph G. Echols Memorial Hall Sunday afternoon, but Lewis wouldn't miss her seventh spring convocation at Norfolk State University.
This was her first Norfolk State awards ceremony as a parent.
Six times before, in the '70s as a sociology major and again in the '80s when she earned a bachelor's in early-childhood education, Lewis had taken home honors from the annual ceremony, which recognizes the university's highest academic achievers.
Now, her daughter Trista, 18, was a freshman at the university - and about to receive a few awards of her own.
``There she is,'' Lewis pointed to the gymnasium floor. ``In the black-and-white-checked jacket. Do you see her?''
At a time when the number of young African Americans entering teaching is declining, Trista Lewis and her fellow prospective teachers among Norfolk State students were granted special attention at Sunday's ceremony.
That was largely because the convocation's main speaker was Elaine P. Witty, dean of the university's School of Education. She has been a national leader in drawing attention to the falloff in blacks entering teaching - and in developing programs to help reverse the trend.
Witty told the audience of about 3,000 that society has made ``instant gratification . . . the priority,'' but she urged students to rethink what's important. ``You are studying in a time when we need to proclaim the primacy of giving rather than getting. We need to see serving rather than receiving as the center of life.''
In previous speeches and writings, Witty has said the turning away of young African Americans from teaching is easy to understand: teacher salaries have fallen further and further behind salaries for many other jobs in which college degrees are important.
But, she said, the trend is bad, and not only for the black community.
In an increasingly multicultural world, all students benefit from ``sustained interaction with authority figures and leaders from different racial/ethnic backgrounds,'' she wrote in an article last August for The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star.
Brian Wright, a Norfolk State senior, could be one of those authority figures Witty described.
He has the brains and polished self-assurance to have made a dent in just about any field he chose. But he heeded the call ``to serve,'' as he put it, and majored in early-childhood education.
He's made the Dean's List six or seven straight times. Next fall, he'll enter a master's program at New York University on a full academic scholarship. He wants to teach early-childhood teachers someday.
What draws him to teaching? ``Teaching affects eternity,'' he said. ``You never know where what you taught somebody stops.''
His mother, Elton Wright, nodded, smiling. She drove in from Suffolk two hours before the award ceremony started, to grab a front-row seat. Brian, at 23 the youngest of her four children, will be the first to graduate from college.
He wasn't an outstanding high-school student. But in college, his mother said, ``he got real serious.''
Several seating sections away, Orlena Lewis told a different story about her daughter, Trista. ``When she was in eighth grade, she started looking for a college,'' she said, glancing around to find her daughter again on the crowded gym floor. ``I told her, `Get out of high school first.' Before you knew it, high school was over.''
Now that she's in college, ``she tells me she's going to graduate summa cum laude,'' says her mother, who earned cum laude and magna cum laude honors in her own days at Norfolk State. ``I tell her, `Go for it.' ''
Trista Lewis wants to be a teacher like her mom, who teaches first grade at B.M. Williams Primary School in Chesapeake. Then, maybe she'll go on, like her mom has, for an advanced degree. Her mother is finishing a master's in curriculum and instruction at Old Dominion University.
Mother and daughter thrive on learning, which is what teaching is all about. ``Teaching,'' Orlena Lewis declared. ``I don't know where she got the idea for that.'' ILLUSTRATION: AT NSU, A TIME FOR PRAISE
[Color Photos]
PAUL AIKEN
Staff
Anthony Taylor waits for the rest of the students to fill Joseph G.
Echols Memorial Hall on Sunday. Taylor, a freshman in
early-childhood education from Chesapeake, fractured his foot a week
ago Saturday during a wrestling tournament. He's trying for the NSU
team.
Brian Wright, 23 and a senior, will enter a master's program at New
York University next fall on full academic scholarship.
by CNB