Louise Schwingel

I can’t imagine teaching anyplace else but NMH. I love the mix of kids and the freedom of the classroom. I love that the school believes in the ability of students to grow and change intellectually, emotionally, and physically.

I’ve been here since 1974 and taught everything from freshman English to AP. My favorite class is whatever I’m teaching at the moment. This past year I taught Shared Voices, which combines US History and American literature. We read inaugural poems; just before we watched Barack Obama’s inauguration, we looked at YouTube clips of Robert Frost reading his inaugural poem for John F. Kennedy, and Maya Angelou reading for Bill Clinton. It was a wonderful collaboration of history and English—and it was amazing to witness the power of poetry in that incredibly patriotic setting.

I’ve taken three term abroad groups to Egypt, two to Australia, and one to Turkey. It’s been exciting to come back from abroad with books my colleagues haven’t read. The Book Thief is a great one I found in Australia: it’s about a girl in Nazi Germany who steals books because she knows history is being rewritten. The narrator is Death. I thought it would be an interesting way to teach writing—to look at an impossible narrator. My freshman writing class loved it. They then tried using different narrators, either abstractions or spiritual beings. Because of the literature, they thought of narrative styles they never would have come up with otherwise.

My favorite NMH students are those who come thinking they probably won’t be great readers and writers. Then they start reading literature, and they begin having powerful ideas and words of their own. They start thinking about themselves differently. They’re the ones who come in as C students and by the end of the term are getting As and still can’t believe it, and then take AP English senior year. I just got a letter the other day: “Do you remember when I was in that PG English class, and I’d never even read a whole book? I just want you know I’m an English teacher now.”

I love this school, and I love this place aesthetically. In our classroom, we look out big back windows down to the river. I like to teach early in the morning, when the fog is still down on the river. I see that as a metaphor for teaching. You know from your memory that something is there, but you can’t quite visualize it because it’s so lost by the fog. Then gradually the fog dissipates, and the beauty of that valley is so clear and fresh.