
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, June 5, 1994                   TAG: 9406050004
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B-7   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: NORFOLK                                LENGTH: Medium

NORFOLK ATHLETE BECOMES FIRST TOMORROW'S TEACHERS SCHOLAR

Ernest Mitchell was the basketball team captain at Granby High School and always figured that sports would be his ticket to college.

But then Mitchell got a full four-year grant for academics and turned down a basketball scholarship to go to Virginia Tech to learn to teach.

Mitchell, 18, is the first participant in Norfolk's Tomorrow's Teachers program, created in November to encourage more blacks to become educators. In exchange for a scholarship worth about $40,000, he's agreed to work in Norfolk schools for four years.

He's already looking forward to coming back.

"I think I have a better perspective on what the kids need to be taught, and what the kids need to know because I did it myself. I came out of Norfolk schools," he said. "It's one thing to tell them. It's another thing to show them."

Mitchell grew up in a duplex where noise from traffic and neighbors' arguments drift in the open windows on hot days. He's learned to block it all out when he studies, just as he blocked out distractions on the basketball court.

He still wants to try out for the Hokies, but he has never let athletics crowd out academics. He signed up for calculus, advanced placement English and other tough courses his senior year at Granby when other students were slacking off. Still, he kept up his self-imposed minimum of a B average.

His parents, Eugene and Cynthia Mitchell, make their living with physical labor, and they wanted something better for their sons, his mother said.

For a while, Mitchell thought about being an engineer. But then he spent part of last summer tutoring elementary school youngsters in a program at Old Dominion University.

He remembers the thrill he felt as he helped guide them through confusion over a problem, and saw them gradually light up as they began to understand.

"It just hit me," he said. "Education, this is better than engineering."

by CNB