Evans High School Spanish teacher DiAnne Johnson has been an educator for over 35 years and wouldn’t have had it any other way.
“I used to drag my little sister into the garage and put the chalkboard up and teach her ABC’s,” said Johnson. “She knew all of that stuff before she went to kindergarten because I made her learn it in the garage. I just always had the teacher in me. Every job I’ve ever had besides teaching, I ended up in some sort of instructive role. It’s just kind of my nature.”
This year, the Foreign Language Association of Georgia (FLAG) nominated Johnson for the 2023 Southern Conference on Language Teaching (SCOLT) Teacher of the Year Award. In March of 2022, FLAG awarded her Teacher of the Year for secondary level, or grades 9 – 12; and that same month, the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese also awarded her Teacher of the Year.
“Lightning struck twice,” she said. “I just felt I’d won the lottery professionally. I was super excited and so honored, but also so humbled because I know how many other wonderful people are out there in my profession and how few of us get recognized.”
Alongside Spanish, Johnson has also taught music for Kindermusik of Augusta. She developed her interest in proficiency in Spanish as a child, speaking the language with her Colombian babysitter.
“After we moved away from there, I never had a chance to speak Spanish anymore until I was getting towards high school,” she said. “And she told me before we moved away, ‘Never forget your Spanish.’ And that just stuck in my mind, my whole life.”
Johnson would study at what was then Augusta College under language professor Jana Sandarg, who would become a mentor. She would go on to teach both English and Spanish before eventually focusing her career on the latter.
“My favorite aspect of teaching a language is watching the kids and grow in their abilities,” she said. “It’s super fun and wonderful to experience watching someone grow from that very, very basic knowledge—or maybe not any knowledge at all except for what they’ve heard on Sesame Street or on the television—and becoming proficient to whatever degree they possibly can. That to me is amazing and gives me a wonderful sense of accomplishment for myself, but also so much pride in them that they’re able to do that.”
Johnson has been nominated for these honors by her colleagues, to whom she attributes her success as an instructor. In her classes, she stresses an uncompromising belief in the ability of her students to achieve as much as possible.
Even this quality, which she names as a strength, she attributes primarily to the influence of fellow teachers and another one of her mentors in college, education professor Frank Chou, who advised her to keep her standards high.
“Don’t believe ever that they can’t do it… that’s going to push them to try harder and do more,” said Johnson. “He just kind of put that in my mind as a baby teacher; and that has driven my opinion of my students all along. You might think you can’t do it, but I know that you can.”
Skyler Q. Andrews is a staff reporter covering business and general reporting for The Augusta Press. Reach him at skyler@theaugustapress.com.
