By Scott Taylor

Hoping to continue coaching tennis in Flora, Mr Daniel Pieplow told his college professor that he needed to student teach in or near Flora. His professor allowed him to since he coaches here, even though it isn’t allowed due to the possibility of teachers being easy on them and still treating them like their students.  

This decision allowed him to return to FHS from which he graduated from in 2015. 

He originally didn’t want to be a teacher. He majored in Ag at Kaskaskia but through coaching the tennis team he decided that he enjoyed working with the kids, so two years ago he switched his major.

The road to get to where he is now wasn’t an easy one, though. He had to earn a four- year bachelor degree and pass the ed TPA (Teacher Performance Assessment). The TPA consists of three parts: planning and learning a segment of three to five lessons to teach, videoing themselves teaching the lessons, and choosing an assessment and writing a seven page commentary on how that assessment measures student learning. After he finished all of that he had to send it off to be graded on a 0-75 score, in which a 39 is the cutoff for a passing score. 

Talking about his journey, Pieplow said that it’s a totally different experience as a teacher than what it is a student, and said there was a lot of pressure to prove to himself that he is worthy of being one of the teachers. 

He wants to be a high school history teacher. He will be okay with teaching junior high as well. Pieplow will start subbing second semester and since teaching jobs are hard to get mid-year, start looking for a job after spring. He is hoping to find a job here so he can continue coaching. 

His biggest fear about teaching is that he doesn’t like public speaking, but he said it was easier to be in front of high school kids. 

Pieplow loves having discussions with the students, and he has a special project for when he starts teaching. Students will have to do an oral history report about the people of their community to get the history of Flora and the surrounding area. 

“It has been an awesome experience, coming back to my hometown has been a great experience, and hopefully, I will get a more permanent position in the school district.”