The high school teacher who taught us like kindergarteners
How do you say thank you to someone whose playful teaching (and coaching) style changed the course of your life?
My high school Spanish teacher is retiring.
Well, she’s not exactly retiring, but she’s leaving the classroom to take on another job helping young people (more on that in a moment) and I couldn’t let this moment pass without telling you a little about her and the impact she had on my life and, surely, the lives of hundreds of other students over her career.
Her name is Holly Harmon, and I met her about 25 years ago, when she was in her first decade as a teacher at a small Midwestern high school with about 500 students.
Everyone in our school had to take a language class, either French or Spanish. I must have been a sophomore when I signed up for Harmon’s class, where she broke down Spanish vocabulary and verbs into classroom-sized bites of fun for a bunch of rowdy 15- and 16-year-olds.
We made colorful piñatas and papel picado and used our new Microsoft Word skills to make travel brochures for places in Spanish-speaking countries where we’d like to visit one day.
That’s not unlike many high school Spanish classes, I think, but there are a few very small details about her classroom that are absolutely unforgettable to me, even all these years later.
First, she asked her students to take pop quizzes using a pencil in our non-dominant hand and write directly on the desk, not on a piece of paper. Writing with the opposite hand — on a surface that we are usually banned from writing on — would engage the non-dominant side of our brain, she told us, where language learning lives.
After the quiz was over, she handed out cans of shaving cream so we could limpiar el lápiz off of the pupitre.
She knew we were eager to break the rules at that age, so she gave us the space to bend them.
I remember her telling us outright that she was teaching us like kindergarteners. That was code for: This is a place for playful learning. And play, we did.
She taught restaurant words one week and parts of the body the next. Days of the week, numbers, common phrases. We sang songs and acted out scenes and made up games that encouraged repetition of these new words and much-needed movement of our bodies.
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Her class was easily my favorite for all those reasons, but we had a rapport because she was also my assistant volleyball coach. We spent an inordinate amount of time together during those volleyball months, when we’d practice every day after school and then go to games a couple of nights a week, sometimes traveling an hour each way, not including a stop at McDonald’s on the way home.
She coached us on technical skills, like serving or setting, but she also did all of those coach tasks, like wrapping ankles, managing team drama, and giving impassioned pep talks in the locker room that somehow motivated a room of jaded teenagers to work their butts off on the court.
Along with our head coach, Stephanie Heman, they could not have been better mentors during those formative years.
When these women told me I could do something, I believed them.
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