‘I understand you.’: Ky. Teacher of the Year lived the life of his vulnerable students

The educator named Thursday as Kentucky’s 2022 Teacher of the Year said he once had a student tell him, “Knowing how to use a comma doesn’t take a needle out of my mother’s arm.”

“I think about that any time I’m trying to organize an assignment,” Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr., who teaches at Montgomery County High School, told the Kentucky Department of Education staff in a website profile.

Carver, an English and French teacher, wants his students to apply his lessons in the real world.

He tries to instill humanity in his classroom, just as his teachers in Floyd County schools did when he was growing up.

“I remember teachers doing little things like offering me a pair of shoes and telling me .., ‘Oh, my son couldn’t wear these and I thought maybe you would like them,’” Carver told the Department of Education. He said the teacher had scuffed the shoes so it would not be obvious he was being given new ones.

“I had wonderful teachers who understood just how little resources most of the students in the school had,” he said. “I know there were Christmases where the toys in my house were purchased by my teachers.”

He told the Herald-Leader the award recognizes the “power and importance” of those teachers and “recognizes the sacredness of what I do.”

Valvoline will present the 24 recipients of the state’s Teacher Achievement Awards with a cash award and certificate. Carver will receive $10,000. The three Kentucky Teachers of the Year — middle, elementary and high school — also will receive varying amounts of money along with custom-designed glassware commemorating their accomplishments.

Carver also received $3,000 for being named high school teacher of the year. He will serve as an ambassador for teachers. Carver also can serve a semester-long sabbatical with the Education Department.

“Thank you for standing up for these kids, for letting them be who they are,” Gov. Andy Beshear said as he announced that Carver was the winner at a virtual ceremony.

After high school, Carver earned a bachelor’s degree in English at Morehead State University in 2006 and finished the Master of Arts in Teaching program in English and French in 2009. He completed post-graduate work in Georgia and at Morehead.

His first taught English at a high school in Clermont, France, an hour north of Paris.

“I had no clue what I was doing,” he said in the state Education Department article.

Carver said his father looked at him before he left for France and said, “If you mess this up, we can’t help you. You’re on your own.”

“It wasn’t that they didn’t want to help, but it was a reality check that I was in this alone,” he said. “I knew going into this that I had to make it work, and I had to do it on my own.”

Carver said he discovered that he had much in common with his poor students who lived in a small village.

“They had really strong regional accents that made them terrified to go places,” he said. “I thought, ‘I’m from Appalachia Kentucky, I get this. I understand you. You are my people.’”

He then taught French at the University of Georgia and, afterward, moved back to Kentucky to teach high school in the Raceland-Worthington Independent District.

Not long after, Carver began teaching in Montgomery County.

There, he formed the Happy Club, a student-led group that focuses on making the school a better place.

Club members distributed messages at lunch, including “vocabulary words, recipes for biscuits and facts about kangaroos,” the KDE article said. They organized students to donate food to classmates and created a Post-It wall with positive messages.

Happy Club members created a second club called Open Light, the county’s first inclusion and outwardly LGBT-affirming club, Carver said.

Carver said the 2022 Kentucky Teacher of the Year award is a tribute to the teachers who told him that his challenges in life had no bearing on what he was capable of. He thanked them Thursday.

“Students see themselves as a kid from Floyd County or a kid from Montgomery County sitting in French class,” he said in the KDE article. “I want them to see themselves as someone who can do anything. “

This story was originally published September 9, 2021 at 2:34 PM.