Few things are as rewarding as being recognized by your peers.

Fort Mill High School physics teacher Jeanie Whitten earned such an honor this month when she was named Fort Mill's Teacher of the Year by the Teacher's Forum.

"I don't think anything could be better than being chosen by your peers because that's the ultimate compliment," Whitten said. "Fort Mill High has a very strong faculty team, I'm so fortunate to work with such a strong faculty."

First, Whitten was chosen as the high school's teacher of the year, then she was picked as the district's top teacher from among the best teachers from all of the district's schools.

The forum, which is made up of the teachers named as the teacher of the year for each school from the previous year, used a lengthy process based on interviews, essays written by this year's top teachers and observations of them in action to determine this year's winner.

"We had to write about our philosophy of teaching and the trends in education that we feel strongly about," Whitten said.

"The technique I use is a systematic approach to learning that starts with concrete examples in the lab, then the underlying principals evolve through a student-centered approach."

Whitten has been teaching in the Fort Mill School District since 1984, when the high school was still located at the Banks Street complex and there was only one elementary and one middle school in the district. She witnessed the advent of the career cluster program at the high school, and now teaches an honors physics class and physics for the technologies I and II for career- or tech school-bound students.

"I introduce the conceptual ideas through the labs and we talk about the theory after the hands-on experience," Whitten said. "Learning is a process of making sense of experiences."

Whitten, who lives in Fort Mill, helps her students build balsa wood bridges in her honors classes. Her technology students build soundproof boxes. But the favorite lab is always the hovercraft, Whitten said. The students sit on a round board with a rubber air cushion mounted on the bottom holding a modified vacuum cleaner that fills the cushion.

"They take turns pushing each other around the commons area," Whitten said.

Whitten never pictured herself as a physics teacher growing up. She was inspired by a high school biology teacher to go into the profession, and always assumed she'd teach biology. Her first job in 1979 was teaching earth science.

As her career progressed she took several physics classes while working on her masters degree. She found she really enjoyed physics and she's still learning, but she never got to teach biology.

"I describe myself as a work in progress," Whitten said. "I'm constantly adjusting my approach to teaching physics."