THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 20, 1994 TAG: 9411170246
SECTION: CAROLINA COAST PAGE: 05 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY PAUL SOUTH, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BUXTON LENGTH: Medium: 96 lines
IF PICTURES ARE worth 1,000 words, Marta Langowski's room at Cape Hatteras School is a multi-colored library. Student-crafted images of John Lennon, Jim Morrison, Bob Marley and an elegant woman in sunglasses who looks amazingly like Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis gaze from the walls.
``Everyone thinks it's Jacqueline Kennedy, but it's not,'' Langowski said. ``I think it's a model that one of the kids saw in a magazine.''
For Langowski, Dare County's Teacher of the Year, every picture tells a story, revealing a little piece of a student's heart. The images occupy places of honor in the room, a testament not only to a student's ability, but to a teacher's passion for her work.
``I love my job, I really do,'' the art teacher said. ``I enjoy staying after school until 5 o'clock. I like hanging the kids' pictures and matting them. It makes me feel good. It makes them feel good.''
The pictures also reveal something to other students.
``There's a lot of discovery of other students' talents that other people don't necessarily know about. There's a lot of self-discovery too. We have students who take an art course because they're part of the North Carolina Scholars program and they have to have it. They found out they really enjoyed it, or were capable of doing more than they thought they could do.''
Langowski has been opening those doors for five years as a certified teacher. She began her career in education almost a decade before, as a teacher's assistant at Cape Hatteras School. She came to Hatteras Island for a vacation 20 years ago, and ended up staying.
``Some friends had an arts and crafts camp in Woodstock, Va. I was working there,'' she recalled. ``In September, I came down here for a vacation. I ended up going back to Woodstock, packing my bags, and moving here. That was 20 years ago.''
Before going to work at Cape Hatteras, she worked briefly for the National Park Service. She went back to college at Elizabeth City State University and completed her degree. Since then, she has tried to keep her students constantly motivated, and constantly surprised.
``I try to make it fun, relaxed, so people feel at ease,'' she said. ``I don't perceive myself as being an interesting teacher. I try to change things so that the learning environment is `What are we going to do next?' or `What are we going to do now?' I don't want students coming into my class and thinking, `Well, I'm in this grade this year, so we're going to do this, this and this.' We're learning the same concepts every year, but I try to do it in different ways.''
She added, ``I don't think I'd feel comfortable in that rigid 1950s classroom, desks bolted to the floor. I try to make it fun. You can't have fun all the time, but you want to create an environment that makes learning interesting.''
Surprisingly, Langowski said she ``never thought of myself as teacher material.''
``I wasn't a bad kid, I was an aggravating kid,'' she said. ``I was the kid that was always aggravating teachers. I never thought of myself as desiring to be a teacher.''
But there is little questioning the desire now. Mention the 1993 fire that damaged the art room, and tears flow from her eyes, tears that speak the unspeakable.
``I was in a little dinky room, not even half the size of this,'' she said, brushing away tears. ``It was really hard. I was trying to do the best I could. Last year, I got into this room, and it was so good to be in here and have all this wonderful space. Then the fire came, and I was saying `God, why did this have to happen?' We had worked so long to build an art facility.''
Langowski remembers what she saw when she came to what had been her dream room.
``It was like a black pit,'' she said, going to the top shelf and producing a mangled piece of orange plastic. Holding it up, she said, ``This was a chair before the fire.''
The orange chair is kept in the room as a reminder. Another hangs in the school's cafeteria, a 136-piece abstract wood sculpture. Crafted by the students, the image of water falling over rocks survived the fire. But on the night of the blaze, the teacher learned something from her students.
``All the kids who had worked on the sculpture came to the school that night,'' she recalled. ``They came because the sculpture was something they had done, and it meant something to them. That's when I knew we were doing something right.''
A year later, as the morning sun shines through the windows, the melted orange chair on a top shelf and the sculpture in the cafeteria are the lone reminders of that black night one year ago. But Langowski is not looking back, nor complacent in the present. There are things left to do.
``I'm proud of what we've done,'' she said. ``But I'm not satisfied with that. I want to find new and better ways to do things. I'll always be looking for that, because I love my job. It's like an addiction.'' ILLUSTRATION: Staff photo by DREW C. WILSON
Marta Langowski, an art teacher at Cape Hatteras School, says, ``I
love my job . . . I enjoy staying after school until 5 o'clock. I
like hanging the kids' pictures.''
by CNB