NOTRE DAME TEACHER REWARDS WITH DOTS

Mary Ha is known as the "Dot Lady" at Notre Dame High School.

"That's because of the technique I use to reinforce class participation by awarding dots for correct answers in class," Ha said.

Ha teaches Spanish, French and mathematics at Notre Dame where she has taught for the past nine years. Before that, she taught for three years at Zalma and seven years at Advance.

She graduated from Notre Dame and received a bachelor's degree in secondary education from Southeast Missouri State University.

Ha knew she wanted to be a teacher since fourth grade, because she saw everything in class so organized and everyone seemed eager to learn.

"I wanted to be a part of that," Ha said.

However, she didn't know what she wanted to teach.

"In high school, I fell in love with Spanish and mathematics," she said.

She didn't realize she would be teaching those subjects to high school students.

At her first job at Zalma High School, not everything ran smoothly and not everyone seemed eager to learn.

"I felt extremely challenged, to say the least," Ha said.

"I know for sure that I learned at least as much from them as they did from me."

She knew she had chosen the best age group to teach.

"Teen-agers have just enough of the maturity of an adult, and they still have a lot of the enthusiasm and outright honesty of their childhood," Ha said.

"I think that everyone should retain a bit of a child in them. No one should ever really, completely grow up," she added.

Ha and her husband, Loi, live in Cape Girardeau with their four children, Thuy, 14, Michael, 11, Aimee, 5, and Christy, 3. Loi owns the Billiard Center in Cape Girardeau and the Golden Lotus Restaurant in Sikeston.

She enjoys hiking, cooking and travel.