Georgia Teacher of The Year John Tibbetts followed a winding path into the classroom

SYLVESTER — There is an legendary Chinese curse which says, “May you live in interesting times.” How it is defined is really up to the individual, and depending on the person, it can also be a blessing.

Georgia’s 2018 Teacher of the Year, Worth County High School economics instructor John Tibbetts, has lived in interesting times.

On Sept 11, 2001, Tibbetts, a West Point graduate who spent 21 years in the Army, was serving as a lieutenant colonel at the Pentagon when American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into the outer ring of the building at 9:37 a.m. The attack killed 189 people. Among the dead were 64 on the Boeing 757, and 125 in the Pentagon and on the ground.

“At the time, I was serving on the Army Staff as the chief of the joint branch. My job was to to be the Army’s liaison with the joint staff,” Tibbetts said. “When I joined the Army Staff I had been on the job for just over a month when 9/11 occurred. Just prior to that, my job with the National Military Command Center was to talk to the guy who had the football.”

“The football” is a briefcase, the contents of which are to be used by the president of the United States to authorize a nuclear attack while away from fixed command centers.

“Our job was to talk the president through his options,” Tibbetts said.

The scenario began to unfold a hour earlier when the first aircraft hit the Twin Towers in New York City.

“I was in (the Pentagon) in the office of my wife at the time who was on the joint staff. As we were watching TV the second plane went into the tower. The original speculation was that it was a private plane that went off course. But when you see that second plane go into the tower, my first thought was that’s not an accident,” he said.

“I bid my wife adieu and said I needed to get to the office, which is in the Army Command center which is two stories down and outside the normal five rings of the Pentagon on the ‘F’ ring” The outer ring is the ‘E’ ring,” Tibbets said. “My phone rang in my office, a major who worked for me, and he is frantic. ‘Sir! there’s a plane that just flew into the Pentagon!’ He’s totally freaked out.

“Now Ted and I would prank each other every now and then, and I said, ‘OK, Ted,’ He said. ‘I’m not kidding, big fireball. Oh, my God, it’s just awful!’ I told him we would check it out. He lived in an apartment overlooking the Pentagon and had seen the plane come over and hit the building. Turns out he speed-dialed the office and his phone call was one of the first calls to come into the building after the attack.”

Tibbetts got another cup of coffee and recalled that, just before that phone call, he had heard a loud thump above ground, like somebody set a dumpster down outside. He said he was used to that type of noise because there was a lot of construction going on.

Tibbetts remained in the Army three years after the attacks. After that, the Tifton native was for the six months a mobile employee and senior consultant for IBM.

“They wanted me to move to Washington, D.C., and I told them I didn’t hire on to move to Washington,” Tibbetts said. “I had two kids in middle school and we had purchased a home in Tifton and I wasn’t interested in moving to Washington. So we parted ways.”

He holds a undergrad degree in computer science and a master’s in history from West Point. He applied for a job with the Tift County school system, but they didn’t have a position available.

Tibbetts later spent a year working with Albany Early College. Two years ago, after Harley Calhoun became the principal at Worth County High School, Tibbetts took a position as an economics teacher at the school.

“I took this job because I cut my commute in half,” Tibbetts said. “It was a no-brainer and Worth County has turned out to be a great place to teach. The best part about my job is that I get to walk in every day and I teach a class that has a great deal of relevance to what goes on in the daily lives of my students. They don’t usually know that or recognize it, but I have an opportunity to try and pull them in and teach them a little bit about what is going on in their lives. The kids are always the best part of my job.”

“We have great teachers in Worth County I have colleagues who care about the kids as much as I do and that is a really neat thing to be a part of.”

Just last week Tibbetts, 56, was named the Georgia Teacher of the year, and he says he never saw it coming.

“Becoming the district Teacher of the Year was more than I expected,” Tibbetts said. “But I won’t lie. After I was nominated for state Teacher of the year, I really wanted it bad.”

And just like that, interesting times just became more interesting.