Meet Madison’s top teacher

Young voices singing “Good morning to you,” echo into a meeting room at the Madison County School Board’s headquarters.

It sounds as if the singing Madison Primary School students are in attendance, but the chants are merely from a video recording of MPS reading teacher Cindy Pattie and her students.

“It allows them to get settled and motivated,” Pattie later said of the song she leads each morning to welcome students to the school’s reading classroom. As the recording continues, the children chant, “Why do we come to reading room? Because we love reading!”

School representatives captured the video in order to take a peak inside Pattie’s classroom, as part of the process to consider the longtime MPS teacher as Madison County Public Schools’ 2009 Teacher of the Year.

Pattie – who was initially considered for the honor after being chosen by her fellow teachers as Madison Primary School’s teacher of the year – was awarded the district-wide recognition by a special three-person committee of publicly unnamed local school administrators.

Despite her success with her students, Pattie says she was surprised when MPS Principal Mike Allers announced that she had been chosen to represent the school as its teacher of the year.

“I think my response was, ‘Me?’” she said.

Pattie was caught off guard by the recognition “because we’ve got so many excellent teachers,” she told The Eagle.

She sees the success of her two grown sons – Marsh Pattie, who works at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, and Michael Pattie, who works as a certified public accountant – as two examples of the strength of the county’s school system.

“Look at what Madison County did for my children,” she said. “It gave them a strong foundation for the future.”

Pattie – a longtime Madison County resident who is a native of Orange – has spent more time inside Madison County Public Schools than most community members. She first stepped foot inside one of the county’s public schools as a freshman at Madison County High School.

It was during her senior year at MCHS that she started dating her future husband – Madison County native Dudley Pattie, who works as the general manager of Rapidan Service Authority. The couple continued to date even while Cindy moved down to North Carolina to attend what is now High Point University. 

“I went into college knowing that’s what I wanted to do,” she said of her ambition to become a teacher. During her time at MCHS, Pattie served as the president of the school’s Future Teachers of America club.

After graduating, she returned to the area, landing a job as a second grade teacher at Madison Primary School. Pattie has continued to teach various MPS grade levels for the past 35 years.

She often gets a surprised response when she tells fellow teachers how long she’s been working in the county’s public school system.

“They say, ‘Are you out of your mind?’” Pattie said smiling. “But when I walk in that school I still have that spark. I love where I am.”

Pattie often teaches children of former students and works alongside three of her former students, who are now employed as teachers at Madison Primary School.

“It’s kind of neat to see the fruits of my labor,” she said.

Although she loves her work, Pattie has had her share of challenging times. After teaching second grade for more than two decades, a particularly difficult year convinced her she needed a change.

“My last year in second grade, I tried to individualize so much and I had so many behavioral problems I decided that I needed a change,” she said. Since then, Pattie has worked as kindergarten teacher for 10 years and most recently as a reading teacher.

One of the biggest challenges she’s encountered is balancing her lessons in order to address those who need extra help as well as keep faster learners’ challenged.

“Having that ability to meet every child’s individual needs…that’s a very big challenge,” she said.

Pattie works to impart her love of reading onto her students, although she does encounter some resistance, often from students who are struggling.

The longtime teacher uses various tricks to boost these students’ interest in and enjoyment of books. She’s had much success with tips she has learned in classes she is currently taking toward a master’s degree in reading from Harrisonburg-based James Madison University.

“I brought in things I was reading,” she said. She then described to the students her reading routine, which includes bringing some books and a cup of coffee out to her “special spot” on a porch off her home.

For one of her students, who didn’t have trouble reading but resisted it because he said he simply didn’t like to do it, the lesson changed his mind drastically.

After the lesson, the student’s mother called Pattie to tell her that her son was excited to learn about his teacher’s reading habits, had recalled them almost verbatim to his mother and, shortly after, had started reading a simplified version of a book in the Hardy Boys series.

“That’s all it took for this guy to really get him motivated,” Pattie said.

By describing how books fit into her own life, the students were able to view reading as more than “just something that my teacher is teaching me,” she said.

“They can see that their teacher loves to read and loves books…they saw it as a practical thing that I’d get excited about,” she said.

When she’s not working, she reads at every opportunity she gets, averaging about three to four books a month, she said. When pressed for an estimate about the number of books she’s read in her lifetime, Pattie agrees that a number greater than a thousand isn’t far fetched.

She’s hoping to pass along her love of reading to her first grandchild, who is expected to be born in October.

“I bought that child 10 books and he’s not even here yet,” Pattie said.