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Online degrees available. Choose from seven completely online programs.Online degrees available. Choose from seven completely online programs.

News: Why I love to teach, Betty Glenn

Time for another edition of Why I Love to Teach, ourfeature on Roane State faculty and why they love to do what they do. Today, meet Betty Glenn, whose Roane State roots run deep (in fact, our president was one of her students).

By Bob Fowler
Roane State staff writer

Betty Glenn says her love of teaching has changed over the years.
At first, she said, she taught computer classes at Roane State to give back to the community college. “I owed Roane State,” she said. “The college got me started towards a degree. I would have been a waitress but for Roane State.”

Then, as the years rolled by, she said she taught “because I feel it’s my mission.”

“I realize that in the counties served by Roane State, I’m doing the community a service by teaching computer skills needed to get a good job.” Now, Glenn teaches for the sheer joy of “seeing that light come on” when a student grasps a concept.

It’s also deeply satisfying when students “want to take every course you teach,” and when former students tell her how her courses “helped them on their jobs.”
“I like that,” she said. “I feel flattered by that.”

Glenn now teaches online classes in Microsoft PowerPoint presentation programs and Microsoft Excel spreadsheets from her Roane County home and says she has no plans to quit.
“I love Roane State, and I’ll teach as long as they (Roane State officials) will have me,” she said. “I like developing new classes, and with technology, there are new developments almost every semester.”

Glenn graduated from high school in Iowa and came to Tennessee after living in Colorado. She and her late husband, Mike Glenn, ran a dairy farm before she landed a job at a Loudon manufacturing plant.

That was back when computers were still something of a novelty, and Glenn said she did data processing – it was called computer operations then – for the manufacturer. The computing bug bit. “I was totally into computers,” she said. It was then that she heard about night classes at Roane State. “I had never heard about Roane State before.”

Her first classes were in abnormal psychology and English composition. Glenn said she was a bit apprehensive about taking night classes on the Harriman campus and packed a pistol under her car seat. Her concerns vanished, she said, when she saw that six police officers were in her abnormal psych class. “Those were the two best subjects,” she said. “I was hooked.”

Glenn started going to Roane State full-time after the manufacturer shuttered its doors, and she graduated summa cum laude with an associate’s degree. A bachelor’s degree in business administration from the University of Tennessee came next, followed by a master’s degree in business administration from Tennessee Tech.

Roane State Vice President Dr. Harold Underwood had been following her scholastic career, she said, and she was recruited for a position in Roane State’s business department. She started in 1990 and taught micro- and macroeconomics, among other courses. It was a daunting teaching load and some courses were new to her, she said.

Betty Glenn, 1994

“I would study all night and teach everything I learned the next day. I studied more to teach than I ever studied in college, and I was just keeping ahead of my students.”

Current Roane State President Chris Whaley was a student in one of her classes, she said, and he only recently learned that Glenn was teaching as she learned. “He said I was a fantastic teacher, and that made me feel good.”

Glenn said she’s now come full circle. She started at Roane State as “an adjunct professor and ended up as an adjunct.” In between, she was an assistant professor and then an associate professor, always in the college’s business department.

While she “retired” in 2012, she continued to teach in the college’s innovative post retirement program and then as an adjunct professor.

More traveling is on her future agenda, as well as hiking and high-adventure outdoor activities such as kayaking. And she’s not about to quit teaching, she said.
“Why would I do that?”​​

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