Richard Overfelt, center, cheers during an exercise in his teacher education graduate class for teachers. Overfelt, 88, began teaching in a one-room schoolhouse at age 17 in the 1940s.

ST. LOUIS — As Richard Overfelt's students arrive to class, he likes to greet them with a hand squeeze and a “happy day!”

They say the Pledge of Allegiance and then choose a song from a homemade booklet — maybe “You Are My Sunshine” or “Kookaburra.”

When he asks how everyone is doing, he's not making casual conversation. It's part of the opening ritual.

“Zip, zip, zippy. Zap, zap, zappy. H-A-P-P-Y. I'm happy!” the class chants back from the circle of folding chairs in the elementary school gym.

They are not elementary students. They are teachers, from 20-something through middle age, spending a week at Rose Acres Elementary School in the Pattonville School District to earn graduate credits.

Overfelt has been teaching teachers since 1972, when he was also a principal in the Parkway School District. He retired from Parkway two decades later but kept up his schedule with Truman State University, teaching three nights a week during the school year and daily each June. This month he will turn 88.

Even during the summer session, he doesn't relax his dress code. In a pinstriped suit and burgundy tie, wing-tipped loafers and thick-rimmed black glasses, he holds court over about 45 teachers from schools throughout the region.

No one has a laptop or cell phone out. “Contraptions,” as Overfelt calls them, are not allowed in class. Instead, “the goal is to use the contraption up here,” he says, tapping his head.

The courses he teaches have titles such as “Ways to Build Successful Students” and “Feeling Good About Teaching and Learning.” They aren't curriculum-driven. There are no lectures or research papers or final exams.

“I don't want to read all those damn papers,” Overfelt joked during a recent interview at his Chesterfield home. On days off from school, he favors denim overalls, a throwback to a childhood spent on a farm.

At first, his graduate classes were more traditional. But as he noticed an increase in stress among his teachers, the classes evolved.

“I do the singing, dancing, marching stuff because most teachers today, with the pressures of high-stakes testing, take themselves too seriously,” he said. “I want to keep the little kid in them alive and move them out of their comfort zone to do activities they can then do with their kids.”

Most of the teachers in Overfelt's classes heard about him and his unorthodox methods from colleagues.

Or, in the case of Laura Schlueter, she noticed the dancing in the hallway. She teaches kindergarten at Sorrento Springs Elementary School in the Parkway district, where Overfelt holds some of his fall and spring classes.

“Everything he talks about is enveloped in what he does,” Schlueter said. During the summer session, the class shares a potluck breakfast and lunch each day.

“The food is not just about feeding us. It's about collaborating about what we bring, and sitting around and talking. We're building relationships and that's what he wants us to do with our students.

“He models that. He remembers things about people,” said Schlueter.