New Teacher Highlight: East Lake Academy: Griffen Zemek
September 9, 2026 – For Mr. Zemek, as the kids call him, seventh grade is the sweet spot. There are questions. There are jokes. There is even the occasional off-topic conversation that Zemek can’t always resist. But in all of it, there is history.
For Zemek, a first-year full-time teacher and seventh grade social studies teacher at East Lake Academy, history has always been more than just a subject in school.
As a kid, he would spend hours searching out information about historical topics on Wikipedia, following one thread to another just to see where it would take him. As he puts it, “I was always a nerd for history.” Now, he gets to share that curiosity with his class of middle schoolers, a grade he is finding he enjoys more than he expected.
Zemek’s path to East Lake Academy began at Chattanooga’s very own University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where he completed a teacher preparation program.
Last year, he was a student teacher at The Howard School. He started by spending two weeks in the classroom every day before moving to two days a week when his college classes began. During the second semester, he was in the classroom almost full time with only one class a week.
As his experience and knowledge grew, he took over more and more of his mentor teacher’s classes. The experience confirmed something Zemek had already hoped was true: teaching was exactly what he wanted to do.
That experience also showed him how important support is for new teachers, something he said Hamilton County Schools does well.
“Just the amount of support I get as a new teacher, even last year as a student teacher, was amazing,” Zemek said. “I’m so happy with how Hamilton County sees how important it is to support new teachers and even veteran teachers. The amount of support I had at Howard alone was phenomenal. And then, now that I’m here, New Teacher Academy was amazing. There’s just so many support systems, and I think as a teacher in general, it seems like a lot of people in the district actually care about us.”
Now in his first full year, Zemek is finding that the hardest part of teaching is also what makes the job fun: every day brings something unexpected.
“Here, you go through a whole 58-minute class session making thousands of decisions, like, in an instant. And then you get three minutes of rest, and then the next batch of kids is coming back in. So, you’re just making constant decisions.”
On top of that, he is also constantly learning new words from his students and keeping up with the latest trends, all while teaching them history, which is a little easier when they are willing to be silly. Unlike his high school students during student teaching, his seventh graders are usually happy to play along.
“These middle schoolers would actually do it,” he said. “So, with these ones, I get to actually have fun.”
That relationship with his students is at the center of Zemek’s teaching philosophy. He makes a point of greeting his students as they walk into his classroom and worked to learn all of their names within the first few weeks. Respect plays a large role in his classroom.
“Everything we do is for a reason. And building the relationships with them. I joke around with them. I respect them. They need to respect me. And it’s mutual,” he said.
He also wants his students to learn that history is more than memorizing facts. It is also about learning who is telling the story and why.
When working with primary sources, Zemek encourages his students to think about who wrote it, when it was written, and what perspective that person brought to it.
“You have to look at who wrote it, when they wrote it, and what perspective they have,” he said. “Because something written about Mongolia, the Mongols, or Genghis Khan invading China by the Mongolians is going to sound very different than something written by the Chinese people who were being invaded. So, it’s important to know who was writing everything you read and what alternative purposes they might have for it.”
As he settles into his first year, Zemek is looking forward to seeing how much he can grow, especially when it comes to connecting with every student.
“I want to see how well I can improve with classroom management and being able to actually connect with every student,” he said. “You just get like a one-word response, and you try to push them every little bit more every day. I want to see, even if it’s by the end of the year, I’m excited to see how well I’ve convinced those kids to like me.”
For now, though, he is happy to be exactly where he is. He knows he is still learning and is open to the feedback that comes with being a new teacher.
“I need critical feedback. I thrive on it,” he said.
He may still be figuring some things out, but Zemek is looking forward to learning from the people around him and becoming the kind of teacher his students need.
