Mr. Morella Profile

With grease covered hair and tinted glasses the driver's education teacher at Philomath High School is hard to miss. Mr. Morella, who is mainly referred to as just "Morella", has been teaching drivers education at PHS for 22 years for the first 14 of those years he taught at both LBCC and PHS.

The New Jersey native attended Rutgers University before moving to Oregon in 1990. He then attended Western Oregon University and Oregon State University, he has a degree from each college. One Master's and two Bachelor's. He began his career driving commercial vehicles along with teaching others how to drive commercial vehicles back in New Jersey. He then heard of a job opening in Philomath, near where he went to college, and decided to apply.

Morella, who will be retiring at the end of next year, enjoys teaching driver's education because he feels that he can create more of a relationship with the students and get to know them better where that isn't the case in other classes. He says that there isn't much that can surprise him, one thing he doesn't like is driving with students at night or in the rain. There are close calls from time to time but Morella tries not to react because often times the driver wont even notice. He tries to stay calm and doesn't raise his voice because that may spook the driver and cause more harm than good.

While on the ride-along an incident occurred right at the get go. As the student drove out of the high school parking lot he forgot to stop at the stop sign, as he passed the stop sign Mr. Morella said "Stop! What are you doing?" The student responded, "I'm doing a safety stop." Mr. Morella replied, "No, you don't need a safety stop! There is nothing blocking your view. Even if there was you need to stop at the sign first then creep out." The student apologized and Mr. Morella replied, "Don't be sorry just don't do it. Your also forgetting something else right now too. Where's your blinker?" The student replied, "I was just going to turn it on." Morella replied in disbelief by saying "No you weren't!" There were also several lies by the student. There was an instance going over Wren Hill just outside Philomath that the student changed lanes but failed to check his blind spot. When asked by Morella if he checked his blind spot the student said that he did and Morella said "I didn't see you."

One thing interesting about Morella is that he is a huge baseball fan, as most New Englanders are. Philomath happened to be playing a baseball game at Newport on the same day that Morella planned to do a drive with two students from Philomath to Newport and back. When we arrived at Newport and prepared to switch drivers Morella had the driver go to the baseball park to watch 10-15 minutes of the baseball game and then head back. The 10-15 minutes turned into 30 minutes, not because of a student but because of the teacher wanting to watch the game. It got to the point where one of the students finally said to the teacher "Mr. Morella, I think we should probably go." Philomath ended up routing Newport 18-5.