TAHLEQUAH —

Teachers influence their students, and respecting them is a key to helping them learn.

Cherokee Elementary Teacher of the Year Randy Hogan said teachers don’t always realize just how much power they have.

“As educators, we need to realize how our words can affect our students,” she said. “Whoever said ‘sticks and stones will break your bones but words will never hurt you,’ didn’t know what they were talking about.”

“When you talk to people about teachers, the first one that comes to mind is the one they didn’t like,” Hogan said. “It shouldn’t work that way.”

An inspiration for teaching came from her aunt.

“Maxine Peterson was a phenomenal teacher, one of the best I’ve ever been around,” she said. “She never raised her voice.”

You get what you give, Hogan said.

“If you treat your students with respect, they’ll respect you. That’s what I try to do. If you ask my kids, they all like me,” she said. “We talk about the Golden Rule. If someone’s been unkind, we talk about that. You wouldn’t want that to happen to you.”

She’ll tell them, “Don’t say it, or don’t do it. It’s easy to be unkind. I need to challenge them to be kind.”

Hogan started working as a volunteer in a Head Start in North Tulsa at age 14. She was always paired with an African-American teacher.

“When we went on field trips, if the black people weren’t saying something to us, the white people were,” she said.

Hogan loves teaching kids how to read.

“Reading separates us from the animals,” she said. “That, and learning how to read – getting symbols to represent thoughts and feelings.”

Everything falls into place for kids who learn to read really well, she said. That “light bulb moment” – such as when a child learns to read – is one of the reasons Hogan loves teaching.

“I like it when the students look at the writings in the journal they keep for the year and can see for themselves how much they can improve,” Hogan said.

She enjoys the true stories in her classroom reading book, “Treasures.”

One favorite tale from the book is about Wilson “Snowflake” Bentley, the first person to photograph snowflakes and recognize how beautiful they are.

“His parents spent all their savings to get him a microscope camera, after the snowflakes kept melting before he could draw them,” she said. “When I put that on the overhead projector and the kids could see the snowflakes, you should have heard the oohs and ahs. And I get into it as much as they do.”

On Fridays, she ties an art project to what they’ve been reading, because “they just don’t get enough art anymore.”

“We’re focused on No Child Left Behind, so much on the at-risk child, I’m afraid we’re overlooking the child who’s really bright,” she said. “We’re still helping the at-risk child, but I wish they had more for the gifted children.”

Teachers have to be held accountable, she said, but she fears too much emphasis has been placed on testing.

“I feel like we had a more well-rounded student before,” Hogan said.

More funding was available when she was in high school in Tulsa.

“I had commercial art, fashion design and ceramics, and in grade school, we had art, music and physical education every day,” she said. “We’re forgetting that creativity is the basis for science and technology. Drawing snowflakes got one person there.”

Imagination is especially important.

“Today I want you to use your imagination,” she tells her students. “If we skip that part, skip over creativity, I don’t think we’ll see as much advancement in our society. A creative person starts with imagination.”

A fourth-grade language arts teacher at Cherokee Elementary since 2000, Hogan has also been a literacy resource specialist for six years. She taught special education for 11 years before that, taking a five-year break in 1995. She taught second grade for one year, in 2000.

If you can teach special ed, you can teach anything, Hogan believes.

She was surprised to learn she was named Teacher of the Year. She’d been nominated several times and took her name out of the running because, “I’d been Teacher of the Year when I was teaching special ed.”

“I kept it on this year because some friends who are teachers asked me to,” Hogan said. “I was up against two very great teachers. I was really honored. For me, every year, every teacher is the Teacher of the Year to somebody.”

She credits the great team she works with in her department.

“We all work together really well – Kathy Knowles, Deborah Dickerson, Gail Garcia,” she said, “and Aaron Roberts; I team-teach with him. He teaches math, science and social studies. He’s only 28, but we get along really well. He talked me into staying on the ballot.”

During her time away from teaching, Hogan painted all types of eggs – quail to ostrich – and gourds. She started painting with a friend.

“Sylvia Smith has done it forever,” she said.

When Hogan retires next year, she plans to return to her artist expressions and art shows.

“Shows are the hardest I think I ever worked, ” she said. “You have to be accepted. That wasn’t hard to do, but the eggs are fragile.”

She is married to Larry, retired director of computing and telecommunications for Northeastern State University. They have a daughter, Roslyn, 33, and son, Reed, 30. The couple attends First Christian Church.

When she retires in 2011, she’ll miss the kids the most.

“l miss my colleagues, but I’ll see them,” she said.

Travel will be on her agenda then, starting with the United States.

“We’ve been all over the West; I want to see the East, Savannah and Charleston,” she said.