Peterson

Every student from Emporia State that begins a student teaching assignment in a high school or middle school classroom has been placed there by Sue Peterson, director of Professional Education Services.

“Placing the student teachers is very time consuming,” Peterson said. “When I first came I placed all (of the students). Now I do not place the elementary education students but I do everything else for them like their student teaching certificate comes from (our office).”

Not only does Peterson do the job of several people, she trains a therapy dog in her spare time and is a cancer survivor.

“It comes easy for me to be interested in dog training,” Peterson said. “I’m an avid dog lover.”

She is currently training a lhasa Apso/Shih Tzu name Zoey. Previously, Peterson trained a service dog named Ravine.

“After I was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, I probably had that cancer a long time but they just didn’t catch it because they thought it was fibromyalgia, I had chemo therapy,” Peterson said. “I had a little dog named Darling and Darling was getting very old. I kept praying ‘dear God, don’t let Darling die before I finish my chemo. I just can’t take that.’ I finished my treatment and Darling died about six weeks after I finished my treatment.”

Knowing that she was grieving over the death of her dog, a neighbor offered to give Peterson one of her puppies.

“I said ‘oh no, I can’t do that,’” Peterson said. “I was just so fatigued.”

She decided to take Zoey and train her to be a therapy dog to visit nursing homes and hospice patients.

“Zoey means ‘life,’” Peterson said. “I named her Zoey Amor. And Amor means ‘love’ so backwards that means ‘love of life.”’

Peterson views hundreds of Emporia State student files every semester to determine where to place students and to decide if they are ready to move on to working with students.

“The parts of my job that are not done by the book are empowering teacher candidates to be successful,” Peterson said. “Once I place the student teachers out there I can’t just forget them. When I send those teachers out, I don’t really know them because I haven’t taught them. It’s almost like I’m selling a product that I don’t know.”

Peterson sits on two admissions committees where she consults with professors and advisors to determine if students are ready to be placed at work sites.

“They’ll say ‘this teacher candidate is having some problems. Attendance is terrible. They were not reliable,’” Peterson said. “I go through and I write down notes. I know that I don’t know that student and I have no way of getting to know that student before they are placed.

Peterson works with a very small staff in the office of Professional Education services.

“I enjoy working with her,” said Shannon Hall, licensing officer for the teacher’s college. “She offers good advice to me as a colleague.”

Although she no longer teaches, she enjoys the minimal interactions that she gets with the students whose files she handles constantly.

“I go to each of those (introductory) classes and I talk to the students,” Peterson said. “I give them my ‘3-Ds’ lecture.”

Peterson’s 3-Ds lecture consists of information about how they must disclose any potential harmful information that could prevent them from becoming teachers, that they have a right to due process and they should assess their disposition.

“(With due process) they have a right to be told what they need to do to fix inappropriate behavior,” Peterson said. “We remind them that they are different and they must think as professional from that day forward.”

While some of the work she does can be frustrating, the best part of her job is seeing students who have been struggling succeed.

“One of the most challenging aspects of my job is knowing when to call in the troops (to help struggling student teachers),” Peterson said. “We don’t want to rescue the student teacher. Our whole goal is always empowering. I tell my student teachers ‘don’t you dare fail because if you fail, I fail.’ I hate to fail. The best part of my job is when a student who has fallen down and skinned their knee says ‘I can do this.’ Then you will see some of the best teaching out them that you ever saw.”

Hall said that Peterson is professional in her work with students.

“I see how well she works with students in understanding their circumstances but she is still very professional in what we need for the requirements for the teacher’s college,” Hall said.

Peterson graduated from Florida State University with a degree in elementary education. She went on to get masters degrees in rehabilitation services and rehabilitation counseling from Auburn University in Alabama. She finished her education with a doctorate in higher education administration from Auburn University.

Peterson said that the reason that she has stayed at ESU all these years is because of the university’s emphasis on students.

“I just love my job so much,” Peterson said. “Working with the students, I just enjoy that, even the ones with the bad attitudes. After I’ve done this job for 12 years I wouldn’t think of going somewhere else and I wouldn’t think of doing another job. The students are such good investments. I thought I was going to save the world and save all the students but there are some students that are not meant to be teachers. There are some that simply did not have that gift.”

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