Leaving a legacy
Tammy Glascock retires from 28 years at PPHS
No particular student stands out in Tammy Glascock’s 28 years of teaching agriculture at Pilot Point High School. They
all hold strong memories for her.
“There’s so many, and I wouldn’t want to name without naming a thousand of them,” Glascock said. “Every kid has accomplished something during their careers as members that made them successful. It might not place with something. have been winning first “To me, success is measured anytime that you can get a student to do something that is out of their comfort zone that they’ve never done before. And when they do that, that’s student success.”
Over the years, she said, hundreds of students have done something they weren’t comfortable doing. The student who stands in front of the class and speaks to his classmates – and was apprehensive about doing so – is just as successful as the student who won a national award, she said. Glascock is retiring this year from the high school, having been at the school since 1990. She taught five years in Forney, from 1985- 90, before she came to Pilot Point.
“I was familiar with the community and knew several people here and the ag teacher [Lloyd Smith] who was teaching here at time I was hired knew of me and ask me to apply for the job,” Glascock said, explaining how she came to Pilot Point. She said she had also wanted to get back closer to Gainesville, where she was from originally. The time was right to retire, plus she was asked to apply for a job with the Texas FFA.
“It’s an opportunity that I really couldn’t turn down,” she said. “My position with Texas FFA will allow me to stay at home and work from home. I will be the [Supervised Agricultural Experience] coordinator and the swine validation coordinator. And with that position, especially with the SAE, I’ll get the opportunity to work with every kid in the state of Texas that’s involved in the FFA.” She said every student who is in an ag class has to have an SAE, and that is where they incorporate what they learned in the classroom into a hands-on project activity that can be done during in-school and after-school hours. “It’s teacher-guided but student-driven,” she said.
She plans to split time between Pilot Point and Marietta, Okla., where she and husband Randy have a ranch. He retired last year from PPHS where he also taught ag. Receiving Teacher of the Year was “pretty special” and “totally caught me off guard,” Tammy Glascock said. She had never received the award before. Randy Glascock received it last year. “That was a very nice honor to finish out the year,” she said.
Sarabeth Trantham, an adjunct faculty member at Tarleton State University, will replace Glascock, who will work with her in the next month in a transition period. Glascock will guide Trantham in the new position and help make the shift from the college level to the high school.
Trantham started before the Christmas break. At PPHS, Glascock taught principles of ag, an introductory course, along with classes on advance animal science, small animal, vet tech and practicum and ag. “In the courses that the kids have taken here, we’ve had students who have become doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, nurses,” she said. “They’ve gone into all the different types of job you can possibly have.
And I tell the kids when I have them in class, going into an ag-related field is great, but the lessons that we try to teach hopefully has prepared them for any type of career that they might have. That was the plan. We’ve tried to instill lots of life lessons.” The students and other faculty members are the two aspects of teaching she will miss most. “That’s easy – kids and other faculty members,” she said. “Just the general camaraderie, because it’s like a big family. That’s always been a neat thing about working here. ...
The kids have always been just an extension of my own family.” Her advice for teachers to be effective is they should be understanding, caring, compassionate, and believe in what they’re teaching and that the students can have success. They also need to correlate what they teach to what students will be doing in life. “You’ve got to love what you do,” she said.
Glascock, who grew up on a farm that had cattle, pigs and sheep, received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from East Texas State University, now Texas A&M-Commerce. Her father taught ag for 49 years at the high school and collegiate levels. She said his values of hard work and dedication helped her in her career. Glascock hears from students all the time, she said. “I’ve got a freshman student this year that I had his dad years ago,” she said. “He brought me a Christmas card this morning, so you hear back from them and keep up with them. Especially in the ag side of the educational system.”
She said Pilot Point has been a great place to teach and raise her children. She and Randy have two children, both of whom attended PPHS: Rachel, class of 2008, and Thomas, class of 2012. Rachel Gray works as a sensory analyst for Tyson Foods in Springdale, Ark., and Thomas is working on master’s degree in meat science at the University of Arkansas. He wants to be a farmer and rancher at some point.
“I don’t think there’s a better place in the state of Texas that you can get the community support and the student support that we’ve had here,” she said.
