If you’re a student who believes you’ve been at North Atlanta for an eternity, consider this: Your eternity here doesn’t even come close to matching the eternity that history and social studies teacher John Yeargin has spent here.

In 1988 he started his teaching career at Northside High School, which is one of our school’s institutional predecessors. North Atlanta was founded in 1991 with the merger of Northside and North Fulton High School.

Since he’s been a teacher for more than 27 years, Yeargin said he feels like something of an expert on North Atlanta. “It’s good that I teach history because I sure have seen a lot of history around here,” he said.

But how did he come to be a teacher? Yeargin earned a degree in political science from the University of Alabama in Huntsville and a bachelor’s degree in history along with a teaching certification from Georgia State University. During his collegiate studies he also earned minors in economics and philosophy.

In the course of his years teaching, he has taught a wide variety of subjects for the school’s social studies department. These classes have included history, whether American history, Latin American history or world history. For many years he has taught an IB course called Theory of Knowledge. The class contends with philosophy and a class focus is getting students to think about the world and the essence of life itself.

Yeargin said he finds many reasons to continue teaching. He said the profession keeps him young and that he enjoys seeing his students develop academically. Another reason he loves teaching is because he can see his work has significance that goes well beyond his classroom. “I do what I do with the consideration that an educated electorate is one of the key fundamentals to preserving the republic that we live in,” he said.

After so many years of teaching, Yeargin feels the best and most memorable moments are when students connect what he’s teaching to the outside world. “The kids in my classroom will be future leaders, or I have that in mind when I teach. So I love it when they begin to think of a world that goes beyond what happens within these walls,” he said.

The classroom is his obvious natural professional habitat, but he does sometimes imagine himself in other roles that match his life interests. He said his dream jobs would either be working in the U.S. Department of State or working in a ski resort in the late fall through early spring. Yeargin has a serious outdoorsman bent and for years he has led whitewater rafting exertions on weekends on the in North Georgia. “It’s what I do to decompress and it’s something that lets me get a healthy contrast to the classroom,” he said.

He’s worked with hundreds of fellow colleagues, has taught thousands of students, has worked under numerous principals, and has seen plenty changes at North Atlanta. Through it all, he’s never lost his enthusiasm for his life’s profession. And up in Room 10119, John Yeargin continues to make North Atlanta history of his own.