For all he knew, Dan Teague was done teaching math. He’d loved numbers all his life, but as he and his wife, Jo, strolled through Raleigh’s Crabtree Valley Mall in late December of 1982, he was heading in a new direction. Just recently he had left his position as a three-sport coach and teacher at Raleigh’s Broughton High School to pursue a graduate degree in physical therapy. If all went well with grad school, perhaps he’d have a career as an athletic trainer for a major college or professional team somewhere.

But at the mall he and Jo bumped into Rufus Owens, a former colleague from Broughton High. Owens had left the school, lured away to be a founding chemistry teacher at a new, statewide public high school in Durham called the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics.

“So, how are things at Broughton?” Owens asked.

“Actually, I’m not there anymore,” Teague said. “I’m back in school.”

“Oh,” Owens replied. “In that case, do you think you might be interested in a job teaching a few math classes to finish out an academic year?” The brief conversation that followed shaped the next 41 years of Teague’s professional life.

A knack for numbers

First and foremost, Dan Teague was a ball player. Baseball, mostly. It was a sport he’d played all through childhood as he and his family moved from Raleigh to Florida to the Panama Canal Zone to Maryland and finally back to Raleigh, following his father’s career as a chemist. His interest in sports would continue throughout life and almost lead him to a career in athletics.

But it would be math that would define Teague’s career. He realized his knack for numbers in elementary school when the family was living in Florida. He and his classmates had just learned how to multiply single digits when he fell ill for a few days and missed school. While he was out, the class moved on to multiplying larger numbers.

“When I came back, that’s what the kids were doing,” Teague says, “and I remember watching them and figuring out how it worked. I thought, ‘Okay, I’ve got this.’ I wasn’t a super math kid or anything. But I was interested in math and I could figure out how it should work.”

Teague had always enjoyed school and looked forward to each day in class. During an all-school, beginning-of-year assembly in high school, his love of school and interest in math and athletics all coalesced into what he felt was a reasonable career plan. 

“They introduced the new basketball coach during the assembly,” Teague says. “They didn’t introduce the new math teacher or the new history teacher. It occurred to me then that, by teaching and coaching, I would have more opportunities to choose where I could work. So, that’s sort of what led me to teach math. I didn’t want to teach PE – that never appealed to me – so I thought, well, mathematics is something that I enjoy doing. And so if I coached and taught math, that would be sort of a good path.” 

Teague went on to earn his undergraduate degree in physical education from UNC-Chapel Hill. He followed that up with a master’s degree in teaching with a specialization in math from Springfield College, and eventually a Ph.D. in mathematics education from North Carolina State University.

For a very brief moment, Teague considered engineering. Having always been a tinkerer who enjoyed figuring out how things worked (he rebuilt an old Dodge truck once, and spent part of one summer working in a bike shop where he fabricated parts from scratch), the field seemed a good fit for his interests. The joy he had experienced as a student, however, led him back to teaching and coaching and Broughton, where he would first cross paths with the man from the mall, Mr. Owens.

Something even better

Not long after Teague arrived at Broughton, the state began a three-year summer program to certify a number of public school personnel as athletic trainers. Since Teague was coaching three different sports, he was tapped to participate. The experience led him to consider switching careers. If he could get on as an athletic trainer with a university or professional team, he might be able to spend the rest of his career around sports and athletes without the pressures of coaching. Like teaching, it seemed an enjoyable way to earn a living.

But a certification from the state as an athletic trainer would not be enough. Teague would need an advanced degree in physical therapy to land the best jobs. So, he left Broughton and entered graduate school. That’s what he was focusing on when he and his wife decided to go shopping.

The shopping mall encounter with Owens that changed the course of Teague’s professional life owes its existence to a brief, 30-second elevator ride at NCSSM earlier that day. On his way home for the day, Owens stepped into an elevator with the head of NCSSM’s math department, which was located one floor above the chemistry department. The math chair asked Owens off-handedly if he happened to know of anyone currently unemployed who might be interested in filling a suddenly vacant math position for the last half of the academic year. Owens didn’t.

“Until a couple hours later,” Teague says, “when he ran into me at the mall and asked as a matter of courtesy how things were going.

“I didn’t commit right away,” Teague continues. “My wife and I went home and we talked about it. We thought, you know, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It’s a brand-new school, one that Rufus [Owens] is very high on, and the opportunity might not ever come my way again. And if it didn’t work out, then I’d just go back to grad school.”

Teague started at NCSSM in January of 1983, finished out the academic year, and when the new year began he applied for the permanent position. “I thought, well, I enjoyed it enough,” he says. “There’s the chance that this could grow into something even better.”

Extraordinary colleagues and students

Teague had no idea that chance encounter at the mall would lead to a 41-year career, easily making him NCSSM’s longest-ever serving employee. Teaching at NCSSM was a “dream job,” he says, but he never thought much beyond the fact that he loved his job and hoped to keep it.

“I didn’t know how long it would last – sometimes things happen that force change – but I wasn’t thinking that I would do this for a couple years and then do something else.”

The joy that Teague felt in the classroom as a student never abated. It’s why he spent more than four decades as a teacher – teaching courses such as Statistics, Graph Theory/Introduction to Proof, Combinatorics, and Modeling with Differential Equations – and why he will be returning on a part-time basis after retiring, picking up a course or two each semester in relief of other instructors in need of release time.

And he’ll continue on as a coach, too, even though he gave up the athletic field for the classroom soon after joining NCSSM. Since 1987 Teague has coached the teams from NCSSM that participate in the Mathematical Contest in Modeling, an intensive four-day international competition for undergraduate students. The teams have been incredibly successful under his leadership; NCSSM trails only Harvey Mudd College and Duke University in the number of Outstanding Winner papers written and submitted to the competition.

For most folks, 41 years would be enough. And to be fair, Teague is looking forward to slowing down a bit. His wife, Jo, who has been at North Carolina State University for an astounding 49 years, has decided to cut back on her professional responsibilities as well, and so the two of them will enjoy some extra time together. But for Teague, he simply can’t walk away entirely from something he still loves.

“Some of my friends retired reasonably soon after they were able to,” Teague says. “I think maybe they saw their job as just a job. But I never have. I got – and will still get – to work with some extraordinary colleagues and extraordinary students teaching something I really enjoy. And it’s really provided me with lots of opportunities and broadened out who I am.”

To honor Dan Teague’s decades of service to NCSSM and its students, the school recently undertook a $1.1 million fundraising campaign to establish the Dan Teague Distinguished Professorship Endowment funding a new faculty position in NCSSM’s Mathematics Department. The response from alumni was incredible, exceeding the goal by $100,000. As NCSSM is part of the UNC System, the endowment now qualifies for an additional State of North Carolina match of $1 million, thereby solidifying the position.