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.
I don’t think I realized how much I was going to miss their presence in my life until after I left for college. They were people who’d encouraged me to fly, and yet they were still at home, deepening their roots while teaching other kids to fly.
I continued to study Spanish in college, and two years after I graduated, I moved to Spain for a year and eventually got a minor in Spanish because of what I learned in Harmon’s class. And what I learned from her.
Twenty years after that, I’m still speaking Spanish, in my home, in my work, and in my travels.
I absolutely treasure my relationship to this language, so Mrs. Harmon is never far from my mind.
Nunca lejos de mi corazón, tampoco.
Just the sound of shaving cream spraying out of a can takes me straight back to that carpeted classroom with all those windows and that high ceiling on the third floor of the old high school. To that same high school my mom attended and where my grandfather ruled as a benevolent, if easily angered, king.
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I found out a few weeks ago that after 29 years teaching, Mrs. Harmon is leaving the classroom. She’s not exactly retiring, but she’s moving on to become the regional director of JAG, or Jobs for America's Graduates, a program that we didn’t have when I was in school whose mission is to empower young people with skills and support so they can succeed in “education, employment and life.”
For all these years, I’ve remembered Harmon as the person who launched my Spanish journey, but I can look back and see that she was doing this JAG work way back when she was a new teacher. She wasn’t just teaching us Spanish — she was asking us what we wanted to do with our lives, what kind of a future we hoped for.
She was teaching us to think so far outside of the box that we forgot there was a box in the first place.
She was only in her late 20s when she was our teacher, but she had this sense of enlightenment that my teenage self wasn’t fully able to grasp. I knew that she knew things about the world that I would need to know one day. She and her husband of many years never had kids, but there’s no doubt she helped raise a village of them who came through her classroom.
I wonder how many of them remember writing on the desks and cleaning them with shaving cream? How many of them still use that part of the brain she so desperately wanted us to know we had? A part of the brain that could take us places the other half of our brain could never imagine?
Un montón, señora. Un montón.
One last thing before I go this week.
Jubilarse is the Spanish word for retire.
To jubilate. To be free from. I always thought that translation was special. It signified a different way of looking at our work life and how we plan to spend our time after we leave our jobs in order to, by the American definition, rest and withdraw.
Mrs. Harmon — one of the first people to teach me how to look for clues about life that are embedded in our language, our culture, our habits, our homes — is not exactly riding off on a cruise into the sunset in her retirement from teaching. This new job will likely keep her as busy as she was before, but I imagine she is feeling some sense of jubilation as she looks back on her career and thinks about the lives she’s changed.
I am happy to send her congratulations on a job well done.
Until next week,
Addie
P.S. Remember, if you want to buy single copies of The Feminist Kitchen zine, you can find them at the Austin Public Library’s gift shop downtown and on theinvisiblethread.company.site.
I love everything about this. Thank you for this jolt of happiness in my day.
Nothing is better than taking the time to thank the teachers in our lives that had such a profound meaning to us. Your Mrs. Harmon sounds like a very gifted teacher who's unorthodox teaching (on the desk) was exactly what was needed in your classroom. Such a sweet way to honor her with your writing.