Teaching children is a job that—as any teacher will tell you—takes patience, understanding and a genuine love for the job.
For Dorce Trotter, who celebrates 50 years of teaching at Pretty Water School this school year, her love for the job knows no bounds.
When she began teaching at Pretty Water, the school was different back then: there was no mascot, and the school was so small that classes would double up in a single room. Even the campus wasn’t even in the same location; it was across the street from where it sits now.
“I started out teaching third and fourth grade in one classroom; I had four fourth graders and sixteen third graders. So the fourth graders faced one blackboard—we had blackboards back then,” she said, laughing, “and the third graders faced the other one and I’d do a lesson with third grade and then I’d go over to fourth grade and do a lesson with them. We were so small, I think we only had about 75 students,” she said.
A few years later, the school began constructing a new campus across the street, but the progress was slow. Trotter recalled a time when offices, the gymnasium and the cafeteria were at their present location, but her classrooms were still at the cinderblock building across the street.
“The cafeteria moved before all the classrooms moved,” she said. “So we would have to bring our kids over here for lunch, and it didn’t matter if it was raining or snowing or cold or hot. You walked across the street for lunch.”
Trotter has had the opportunity to teach elsewhere, but she says it’s the people at the school that have kept her there her entire career.
“We have had almost without exception, just top-notch administrators and the staff is second to none,” she said. “We’re always so close and we always care about each other. I think is hard to find a staff as cohesive as what Pretty Water staff has been.”
Trotter and her husband are also celebrating 50 years of marriage in August. The two of them had a boy and a girl, who are grown now, and in fact, their daughter Stephanie is a teacher at Allen Bowden.
Despite being a teacher for so long, Trotter says she intentionally sent her kids to a different school so they wouldn’t feel the pressure of seeing mom as a teacher.
“I always felt like it was a good thing to give them their own space and not just be a hovering mother,” she said. “I think as teachers we’re harder on our own children than sometimes we should be, because we expect more out of them.”
Though Trotter has taught a number of grade levels, has been “in almost every classroom in the building,” and even officially retired back in 2005, she immediately came back the next year to work half-days because she loves it so much.
“I really enjoy teaching. I feel like it’s been a calling for me,” she said. “I love the students and it’s my goal to try and be a kind person to every one of them, and help them through whatever they need help getting through that day.”
