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LISTEN | Full interview with Guinness record-holder Glenda Akin:<\/p>\n
As It Happens6:40Teacher wins Guinness World Record for working 61 years at the same school<\/p>\n
Retired Tennessee teacher Glenda Akin has lived and worked through a whole lot of history. And now she\u2019s made history herself.<\/p>\n
Akin, 84, has been certified by Guinness World Records as the longest serving female teacher at the same school<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI loved my job. I didn’t mind getting up and going to school every day,\u201d Akin told As It Happens guest host Paul Hunter.<\/p>\n \u201cAll of my family is gone, and so the school community, you know, they more or less became my family.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2018Lifelong commitment to education\u2019<\/p>\n Before retiring last year, Akin worked at Westmoreland High School, first as a teacher and later as a librarian, for 61 years and 43 days.\u00a0<\/p>\n She has several years on Guinness\u2019s longest serving male teacher, Paul Durietz, who clocked 54 years and 61 days at Woodland School in Gurnee, Ill., as of October 2024.<\/p>\n Akin says she even worked long enough to watch one of her students grow up, become a teacher at the school herself, then retire a full decade before she did.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cMs. Akin\u2019s lifelong commitment to education has shaped generations of students and left an unforgettable legacy in our school and community,\u201d reads a post on Westmoreland High School\u2019s Facebook page<\/a> celebrating Akin\u2019s achievement.\u00a0<\/p>\n Akin says she\u2019s taken aback by all the attention she\u2019s getting. When Westmoreland shared the news, she only expected the school community to see it.<\/p>\n \u201cBut it went everywhere,\u201d she said. \u201c[I\u2019m] even talking to someone in Canada about this. It’s just amazing.\u201d<\/p>\n Cellphones and book bans<\/p>\n Throughout her long career, Akin \u2014 or Ms. Akin, as she\u2019s known at school \u2014\u00a0mentored dozens of generations of students through periods of intense social and technological change.\u00a0<\/p>\n She was born on Dec. 7, 1941, the day Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, pulling the U.S. into the Second World War, and began teaching in 1963 just a few months before the assassination of U.S. president John F. Kennedy.<\/p>\n \u201cThat was the first big historic thing that came along in my teaching,\u201d she said. \u201cThen, of course, a lot of other things after that.\u201d<\/p>\n She was there to see the introduction of computers to the classroom and library system, and of course, the sudden explosion of students with smartphones \u2014 an issue schools are still wrestling with.<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cI think they would do well to put them away when they’re at school,\u201d Akin said.<\/p>\n She also served as a librarian at a time when school literature became an extremely politicized issue.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n According to the American Library Association<\/a>, organized efforts to ban books from U.S. public and school libraries began to ramp up dramatically in 2021. Books with racial or 2SLGBTQ+ content are the most common targets of censorship efforts, it said.\u00a0<\/p>\n Similar battles have played out in Canadian provinces<\/a>, towns and schools<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cAs a librarian, I don’t think books should be banned,\u201d Akin said.<\/p>\n \u201cI don’t want pornographic material in a library and supporting things that are not right. However, I don’t want somebody else telling me what I can and can’t read. And I don’t think that some parents should be telling other parents and children what students could read.\u201d<\/p>\n Just because Akin has retired at long last doesn\u2019t mean she\u2019s resting on her laurels.<\/p>\n \u201cI’m not ready to sit down and give up yet,\u201d she said. \u201cI want to keep moving as long as I can.\u201d<\/p>\n She\u2019s an active member of her local seniors\u2019 organization, plays bingo, and volunteers for both her local and church libraries.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cSo there’s plenty to keep me busy,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Listen to this article Estimated 4 minutes The audio version of this article is generated by AI-based technology.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":380771,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":{"0":"post-380770","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380770","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=380770"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380770\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/380771"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=380770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=380770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=380770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/1767240731_468_default.jpg\")
Akin, centre, poses with her new Guinness World Record and two of her former students, including Westmoreland High School Principal Rick Duffer, left, and school administrator Amber Regan, right. (Westmoreland High School\/Facebook)<\/p>\n