Retired Tennessee teacher Glenda Akin has lived and worked through a whole lot of history. And now she\u2019s made history herself.
\nAkin, 84, has been certified by Guinness World Records as the longest serving female teacher at the same school.
\n\u201cI loved my job. I didn’t mind getting up and going to school every day,\u201d Akin told As It Happens guest host Paul Hunter.
\n\u201cAll of my family is gone, and so the school community, you know, they more or less became my family.\u201d
\nBefore retiring last year, Akin worked at Westmoreland High School, first as a teacher and later as a librarian, for 61 years and 43 days.
\nShe has several years on Guinness\u2019s longest serving male teacher, Paul Durietz, who clocked 54 years and 61 days at Woodland School in Gurnee, Ill., as of October 2024.
\nAkin says she even worked long enough to watch one of her students grow up, become a teacher at the school herself, then retire a full decade before she did.
\n\u201cMs. Akin\u2019s lifelong commitment to education has shaped generations of students and left an unforgettable legacy in our school and community,\u201d reads a post on Westmoreland High School\u2019s Facebook page celebrating Akin\u2019s achievement.
\nAkin says she\u2019s taken aback by all the attention she\u2019s getting. When Westmoreland shared the news, she only expected the school community to see it.
\n\u201cBut it went everywhere,\u201d she said. \u201c[I\u2019m] even talking to someone in Canada about this. It’s just amazing.\u201d
\nThroughout her long career, Akin \u2014 or Ms. Akin, as she\u2019s known at school \u2014 mentored dozens of generations of students through periods of intense social and technological change.
\nShe was born on Dec. 7, 1941, the day Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, pulling the U.S. into the Second World War, and began teaching in 1963 just a few months before the assassination of U.S. president John F. Kennedy.
\n\u201cThat was the first big historic thing that came along in my teaching,\u201d she said. \u201cThen, of course, a lot of other things after that.\u201d
\nShe was there to see the introduction of computers to the classroom and library system, and of course, the sudden explosion of students with smartphones \u2014 an issue schools are still wrestling with.
\n\u201cI think they would do well to put them away when they’re at school,\u201d Akin said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Retired Tennessee teacher Glenda Akin has lived and worked through a whole lot of history. And now she\u2019s made history herself. Akin, 84, has been certified by Guinness World Records as the longest serving female teacher at the same school. \u201cI loved my job. I didn’t mind getting up and going to school every day,\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":155779,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10916],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zamanturkmenistan.com.tm\/%77%70%2d%6a%73%6f%6e\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155778"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zamanturkmenistan.com.tm\/%77%70%2d%6a%73%6f%6e\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zamanturkmenistan.com.tm\/%77%70%2d%6a%73%6f%6e\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zamanturkmenistan.com.tm\/%77%70%2d%6a%73%6f%6e\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zamanturkmenistan.com.tm\/%77%70%2d%6a%73%6f%6e\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155778"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/zamanturkmenistan.com.tm\/%77%70%2d%6a%73%6f%6e\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155778\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":155780,"href":"https:\/\/zamanturkmenistan.com.tm\/%77%70%2d%6a%73%6f%6e\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155778\/revisions\/155780"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zamanturkmenistan.com.tm\/%77%70%2d%6a%73%6f%6e\/wp\/v2\/media\/155779"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zamanturkmenistan.com.tm\/%77%70%2d%6a%73%6f%6e\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zamanturkmenistan.com.tm\/%77%70%2d%6a%73%6f%6e\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zamanturkmenistan.com.tm\/%77%70%2d%6a%73%6f%6e\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}