| Sources |
- [S84] E-Mail, Manda Fox [mgfoxx@iol24.com], 2 Aug 2004.
- [S106] The Mountain Press, 29 Apr 2010.
Hall of Famer: Work pays off with induction into hall of fame
by GAIL CRUTCHFIELD
Bill Williams is one of the first members inducted into the Sevier County Education Hall of Fame. He spent 44 years teaching science classes at Sevier County High School.
“We work for what we get.”
That’s what former Sevier County High School science teacher Bill Williams said when recounting a conversation with students who were building a hover craft for their physics project.
The five girls and one boy chose the hover craft as their project, and Williams told they were in charge of the whole thing.
“I said, ‘OK, we can do it, but now it’s your project, not mine,’” he said. He told them to do their research and bring their plans for him to approve.
“So one kid came in the next day and said, ‘I found on the Internet were we could buy a kit.’ I said, ‘No, no, no. That’s not building. That’s assembling. We’re not going to assemble anything. We’re going to build it from scratch.’”
Williams said he had already found plans and directions on how to build the hover craft when the students came in with their own set of plans. “But I did not share that with them,” he said.
“They came back in and laid out their plans and I laid out mine, and they said, ‘Well, why didn’t you just give them to us?’ and I said, “No, no, no. We work for what we get.’”
Williams is no stranger to work, and his 44 years at Sevier County High School earned him the honor of getting his name on the first list of inductees into the Sevier County Education Hall of Fame.
Teaching science is not what Williams intended to do with his undergraduate degrees in biology and chemistry or his master’s in radiation genetics. From his sophomore year at Carson-Newman and through his master’s program at Florida State University, Williams said he spent a lot of time in research. That’s the direction he was going when he returned to his hometown after completing his master’s.
“I never intended to teach,” he said. “I took no education courses whatsoever.”
In fact, Williams said he had job opportunities at Oak Ridge Associated Universities and at Columbia University in New York.
“Very prestigious,” he said of the latter offer. “I was going to be working at Brookhaven National Laboratories out on Long Island.”
One of two sons born to Robert, a taxi driver, and Elsie Willliams, a housewife, he said his father encouraged him to stay in Sevier County. On that trip home, he pushed things along that led to Williams’ long career in education.
“I intended to leave and go finish up my doctorate, and he talked to one of the school board members who was a good friend of us, and he got them to call me offer me a job teaching,” Williams said.
The principal of SCHS asked him to talk about teaching science.
“I said, ‘OK, I’ll come in and talk to you. What time do you want me to be there?’ and he said 8:30. It was 9 o’clock then. I should have known I was in trouble.”
He decided to give it a shot. “I told him, I don’t know if I’ll stay 30 minutes, 30 days or 30 years,” he said. “Well, I started teaching and I really liked it.”
That year he taught general science, biology, salesmanship and geography. When he was asked to come back the next year, he told the principal he couldn’t teach all of those classes again, but would be glad to teach science.
For 13 years he taught with a temporary certificate until he was informed he would finally need to get his teaching certificate. His psychology courses at Carson-Newman helped him with some of the credits, but the rest he earned in night classes and summer school.
He said he has no regrets choosing to remain an educator. He said he briefly thought of making a change about 32 years ago after his father died unexpectedly.
“I thought, this would be a good time, if I want to do something else, to do it,” he said. “And there just wasn’t anything I wanted to do.”
Even when he had job offers, he chose to stay put.
“I really didn’t want to leave Sevier County High School,” he said.
He taught full-time for 37 years before retiring. He came back and taught part-time for seven more years before finally shelving his beaker to take care of his mother.
Some people may wonder how he was able to work with teenagers for more than 40 years.
“I liked it because I’ve always had good kids,” he said. “People always say, ‘I would kill those kids.’ Well, no, and most people think that I’m a really mean person because I demand something from the kids. I don’t let them play games with me. And that’s when I do get mean.
“I want them to work, I want them to learn,” he said. “That’s the only reason I’m there and the only reason they’re there. That was always just my attitude. Now if we can have a good time accomplishing this, then let’s do it.”
He said his teaching philosophy was influenced by two former teachers, a Mr. Cloyd from Carson-Newman and foreign language teacher Marie Johnson Temple at Sevier County High.
“Mr. Cloyd was my first science teacher in college and he absolutely influenced me science-wise as much as any teacher that I had,” Williams said.
“In high school I took four years of foreign language, and my teacher was Marie Johnson Temple,” he added. “And she was my favorite high school teacher. She demanded you worked hard, you learned. I have kids who come into my class, or had kids who would come into my class and say, what can we do for extra credit? Well, you make a 100 average and then you do extra,” he said he told them.
When they responded by saying they just wanted to earn some extra points to pass the class, he would tell them they couldn’t do extra because they were not doing what they were being asked to do in the first place.
“Marie Temple was one of those people, you know, there was no extra. You did the work and you did it right the first time and you learned it,” he said.
That paid off, Williams said, when he was in college and found that so many of the scientific words he needed to learn had a base in the Latin he learned in Mrs. Temple’s class.
He even gave some thought in college to teaching foreign languages but his introduction to science changed that.
“When I got into science with Mr. Cloyd, that went out the window and I was hooked on science,” he said.
gcrutchfield@themountainpress.com
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1938 - (86 years)
, d. 6 Dec 1977 (Age 66 years)