THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, June 3, 1994 TAG: 9406031058
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY LISE OLSEN, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: 940603 LENGTH: NORFOLK
But then he got a four-year full-ride using his brains, not his brawn.
{REST} And Mitchell suddenly found himself doing something that he'd never imagined: He turned down a basketball scholarship to take advantage of an opportunity at Virginia Tech to learn to teach.
Mitchell is the first participant in Norfolk's Tomorrow's Teachers program, created in November to encourage more African-Americans 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 near Wards Corner, where noise from traffic and neighbors' arguments drifts in the open windows on hot days. He's learned to block it all out.
He moves like an athlete even in his living room. He wears a scraggly beard that makes him look tough until he smiles. His eyes shine. He responds to questions with the same thought-out answers that impressed the scholarship committee.
He's into basketball: He can block out everything else when he plays, and wants to try to make the team at Tech. But he doesn't hesitate to share experiences that shatter the images of what a high school star athlete should be like.
He likes helping little kids - that's why he wants to teach.
His best friend is a girl. Says Talya Goodson: ``My boyfriends don't understand, but his friendship is worth it; he's a real nice person.''
He never let athletics crowd out academics. He signed up for calculus, advanced-placement English and other tough courses his senior year when other students were slacking off, and he kept up his self-imposed minimum of a B average.
He listens to - and respects - his parents' opinions (though he doesn't always agree). His mom named him ``Tank'' when he was born, a 10-pound squat-looking baby who she never dreamed would grow to 6-foot-3.
``Tank'' never gave her any trouble, his mom says - except in seventh grade, when he got caught passing around a pornographic key chain, and another time, when he got into a fight with a girl. ``Some people have the terrible twos: My sons had the terrible 13s,'' said Cynthia Mitchell of Ernest and his brother Mike, now 15.
Ernest looks back at it soberly: `I started hanging out with the wrong crowd, the wrong clique. . . But some kind of way, my mom and dad influenced me.'' He adds: ``It's a thin line kids cross between good and bad.''
His parents, Eugene and Cynthia, have made their living with physical labor - and they wanted something better for their two sons, Cynthia Mitchell said. Ernest Mitchell grew out of his rebellious stage, and survived a self-described ``nerdish'' period, before emerging as a leader and all-around student at Granby High. Now, so many girls call that his mom says she can't keep them straight.
For a while, Mitchell thought about being an engineer. The money looked attractive for a guy who was good in math and came from a working-class family. But then he spent part of last summer tutoring elementary-school kids 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 by watching his example. ``It just hit me: Education, this is better than engineering.''
by CNB