Gary Partenheimer

Every time I think I’m ready to cash out of teaching and go sell insurance, something wonderful, unexpected, and magical happens—in a class, in the dorm, at the hockey rink. Even after more than 30 years at NMH, I still delight in watching students learn and grow. They’ve taught me that good teaching is always and only about good learning (and lots of 21^st-century stuff like how to work an iPod and who’s winning on American Idol).

 

Religious studies is by nature a “stretching discipline,” which is about learning to ask the right questions and not to be satisfied with simplistic solutions. I enter class every day knowing that students are getting something that isn’t part of a conventional high school education. Rilke, in his Letter to a Young Poet, says, “You’ve got to learn to love the questions themselves.”

 

I especially enjoy teaching the senior seminar Turtle Island Transformed: Literary, Historical, and Ethical Perspectives on the North American Landscape, which includes three weeks of travel. In 2007 we toured the Yucca Mountain National Waste Repository in the Nevada Desert. A chief engineer for the project asked the group for questions, and our students began to inquire about politics, economics, history, and environmental impact. The engineer brushed the questions off at first, but finally asked the tour guide, “Who are these guys?” Afterward he came up to me with kudos for the best and most challenging tour he’d ever given.

 

Ironically, I’ve seen more of the world through living in rural Northfield and Gill: two sabbaticals and summer study have taken me to 20 countries. I’ve played soccer on the Arctic Ocean at midnight with an Eskimo (on a trip with NMH students) and had penguins scurry through my feet in Tasmania. I’ve also learned a lot about countries I’ve never been, like Gabon, Korea, and New Zealand, through students from those places.

 

I’ve coached girls ice hockey for many years. In 2008–09, the JV team had a 13–3 season, which was particularly memorable because many of the players started as beginners four years earlier and went 1–13 that first season. Our final game took place at Vermont Academy, where a huge contingent of NMH parents outnumbered the home crowd and showered us with cheers, treats, and gifts. I recently had a surprise visit from the captain of my girls JV hockey team from ten years ago—now a neurosurgeon—who described her time on the ice as a highlight because she was good at everything else and really had to work at playing JV. She told me she loved every minute of it.