Midway High School English teacher Adam Capps has great hope in this generation of young people.
Capps, the 2026-27 Teacher of the Year for Sampson County Schools, is preparing to begin his eighth year in education and his sixth at Midway. He reflected recently on how his reasons for entering the profession have changed over the years.
“I needed a better schedule,” he admitted with a smile, but today he considers himself “the luckiest person in the world. “I never believed I would love teaching, and I am genuinely sad for the semester to end,” he added.
“Some days I would do it for free, but don’t tell the county that,” he joked while describing his passion for teaching.
Capps teaches primarily English II and emphasized the importance of helping young people become effective communicators.
“Our words are the most misused thing in the world,” he said.
Despite the challenges facing today’s students, Capps remains hopeful. After watching students grow in his classroom year after year, he believes they can learn to use their words well with the right guidance.
“This generation of young people gets an extremely bad rap,” Capps stressed, emphaszing that he sees many positive qualities in the students he teaches. He described them as willing to listen to others, admit when they need personal growth and are among the kindest people he knows.
He has watched many students leave his classroom better and kinder than when they entered, something he attributes to both literature and relationships.
“I can’t show them what I’m teaching matters until I show them they matter,” he stressed.
Capps described his classroom as one of his favorite places in the world — a place where he and his students enjoy learning together.
Students, he said, have described his class as “one block a day that it didn’t feel like school, but I took so much away from it.”
One of the biggest issues educators face today is artificial intelligence, Capps acknowledged, but he remains confident because “AI can never replace human creativity.”
He said he can almost always tell when a student has used artificial intelligence to write a poem because he knows each student’s voice. More importantly, he said, “there’s no heart because a robot can’t experience human feelings.”
On the first day of school each year, Capps asks his students two questions: “Why do we read?” and “Why do we write?” He uses those questions to begin conversations about the importance of literature and how reading and writing allow people to participate in conversations that have been taking place for centuries.
Capps also highlighted the need for empathy, referencing a quote from To Kill a Mockingbird: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view … until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
He said empathy is an important part of both his teaching philosophy and his faith. Capps believes teaching is his true vocation from God, and his hope is that his faith permeates his work so that Christ’s light can shine through.
Capps said his greatest hope for every student is “to walk out there and be a better contributor to society than you were before you walked into my classroom.”
As another school year approaches, he said he is eager to welcome a new group of students through his classroom doors, and the hope he has always felt for the generations to come remains strong.