It’s 1947, and a small boy, age 7, walks across a rent home’s yard out in the country. He is doing his chores, drawing water for the rest of the household to use for the day. As he looked across the road to the fields and brush, he had no idea that the area would one day become Lone Grove High School. Now, in 2023, that small boy is a senior citizen full of life experiences, memories, and passion. Mr. Don Whitfill is a new teacher in the building across the street from where his childhood home once stood.
A new science teacher in a district is not a headline-grabbing story. But when the POE Office received a membership application for an 84-year-old, first-year teacher, we had to know more.
Our first question was “Why?”. It’s not every day you enter a new career so late in life.
“The Bible says we all have gifts,” explained Whitfill. “One of mine is teaching. A friend of mine told me that he believed my mission in life was to explain things to people.” Four weeks into the new school year, Mr. Whitfill is utilizing the gift he sees as a ministry.
In March of last year, Lone Grove started looking at resumes for open positions. In April, Mr. Whitfill received an interview and was offered the job. For the last few weeks of the 2022-23 school year, he sat in on classes to get a better understanding of what he was getting into. In August, the school board officially hired him as the district’s new Chemistry and Computer Science teacher.
Students have noticed their new teacher looks a little different from other teachers in their schedule. Some have asked him his age. “When I was in high school, there was more of a barrier between students and teachers,” he said. “I was taken aback by their questions at first. But, my age is not a problem. They know I care.”
Whitfill has had a full life to this point. He fell in love 67 years ago, and celebrated 62 years of marriage with her this year. He has lived in 20 homes in 13 cities across four different states. He has visited 11 countries, all 50 states, and every major city in the United States. He has owned businesses, worked for large corporations, and served in the military. In each unique experience, he has been a teacher.
Early on, teaching took the form of instructing Army Reservists in weapons while he was a student at Oklahoma State University earning his Chemical Engineering degree. Soon teaching became his job. Whitfill made countless presentations, conducted on-site analysis, and taught corporate classes for years in different consulting positions and companies. Additionally, he taught Sunday School classes for twenty years.
Becoming a public school teacher seemed like a natural fit for Whitfill. “My skills are transferable. I have real-world experience and broad experiences in the world,” he said. “I present the academia for the subject, but I’ve also done everything I’m teaching. I didn’t have that in high school.”
Mr. Whitfill’s classes are in two different classrooms in Lone Grove High School separated by a short hallway. Both are filled with equipment and technology. Some might assume using new technology at his age would give him pause, but he thinks it is great. He loves using his smart board to enhance his teaching. His chemistry room has space for both lectures and lab work. And the fully-stocked computer lab feels like home after years of working for Dell.
If Mr. Whitfill could leave anything with his students, it is the knowledge that they can “believe, know, and act on the fact that they can do anything they want in this country.”
“You can be and do anything. I was a boy across the street in a rent house. You can do whatever you want.”
I Love Teaching 