ISU alum earns state-wide honor as technology teacher
As a high school student years ago, Doug Dillion remembers griping about a particularly boring class lecture when a favorite teacher who had overheard the complaint spoke up.
"'Instead of complaining, why don't you do something about it. Why don't you make a difference and do it differently,'" he recalls her saying.
Dillion took that challenge to heart and became a schoolteacher himself. Now a technology teacher at Honey Creek Middle School, the Indiana State University grad recently earned the John E. Gray Memorial Meritorious Teaching Award from Technology Educators of Indiana.
Dillion's technology program at Honey Creek was also recognized as the 2004 model program for Indiana by Technology Educators of Indiana and the International Technology Education Association.
Dillion's technology lab includes a giant ruler for teaching measurements and an electronic arcade game for students who earn grades above minimum test scores. On Fun Friday, music plays in class as students work on lab projects, and a short dance period offers a break for sixth-graders ("By the time they get to the eighth grade that's not cool anymore," Dillion notes).
Dillion has also been able to form affiliations with organizations like the Home Builders Association of Greater Terre Haute, the Indiana Home Builders Association, and the National Association of Home Builders. Honey Creek will be host for the Technology Student Association's state competition next spring.
A member of the Indiana Technology Education Curriculum Committee, Dillion is also a part of the TECCA (Technology Education Curriculum Crosswalks Activities) Project, which is assigned with rewriting the state curriculum standards for Indiana middle schools.
While both his parents were educators (his dad a vocational instruction teacher, his mom a kindergarten teacher) and two of his three brothers are now schoolteachers, Dillion said he never considered teaching as a profession until history teacher Martha Cornelius challenged him that day to "make a difference and do it differently."
"(History) wasn't necessarily my favorite subject, but she could take the most boring thing and make it exciting," Dillion said of Cornelius, someone he considers a mentor.
A graduate of Terre Haute South Vigo High School, Dillion earned both his bacholor's and master's degrees from Indiana State University.
Dillion says he has a great dislike for the lecture method of teaching, sharing Indiana State's penchant for experiential learning.
"Hands on is minds on," he says. "I like to look at what I didn't like in school and try to do it differently."
He prefers critical thinking to wrote memorization.
"I don't like to just give (students) the answers; I like to give them the way to find the answers," he says, "because if they forget it they'll know how to get the answer the next time."
Honey Creek principal Pat Sheehan admits Dillion's teaching methods can be somewhat unorthodox, but he adds "if you sit there and watch him, everything he does is connected to learning."
Dillion's most important attribute, Sheehan says, is his concern for the students.
"He lets those kids know that he cares about them," he said. "He's a very caring person who wants them to learn."
And despite his classes' unorthodox teaching methods, discipline tends not to be a problem. If a student creates a disruption, Dillion says he simply picks up the phone in the class and calls the students' parents to come to class.
"One day of having your parents sitting with you - or even the thought of having your parents sitting with you - in class and discipline is not an issue," he says. "Then you have more time to teach the fun exciting stuff."
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Contact: Doug Dillion, technology teacher, Honey Creek Middle School, (812) 462-4372 or dwd@vigoschools.org
Writer: Mark Gibson, assistant director, public affairs, Indiana State University (812) 237-3790 or devgibso@isugw.indstate.edu
ISU Communications and Marketing: (812) 237-3773 or http://www.indstate.edu/news
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