October-November 2001 Edition

A Very Special Teacher   (Note:  The New Jersey Council for the Humanities recently honored Nancy Tuttle, an Art, Music and English teacher at Fair Lawn High School as one of five distinguished teachers in the state.) by Joanne Cooney, Language Arts Supervisor Nancy Tuttle is a unique English teacher, the kind who receives Christmas cards from students she taught some twenty years earlier, the kind that serves as the subject of college essays and fond remembrances that turn into family stories.  Nancy redesigned and teaches the senior course entitled Advanced Humanities.  Her background in literature and art recommend her for the task, but it is her grasp of essential questions and her desire to make learning significant and relevant to her students that serve as the impetus for change. Nancy's students explore the purpose of life, the role of the artist, and the impact of personal morality on society.  Her class is a series of student-taught seminars, and observing her classes, one might find her students discussing Monet by wearing "milk bottle lenses" and using pastels to color water lilies.  Her students discover the difficulty of painting the Sistine Chapel by recreating "The Creation of Adam" upside down on their backs under their desks.  They listen to a fairy tale about the nightingale to understand Yeat's "Sailing to Byzantium," or they might view a videotape of a student-presenter who plays Bach on the piano as they try to identify each piece he plays. Nancy Tuttle is a magician.  She can transport her students to Neverland, pre-revolutionary Russia, or the hometown of her childhood.  She dresses up as Homer and read the Cyclops episode of The Odyssey.  She dons an extraordinary wig and gown to transform herself into Marie Antoinette in pre-reading A Tale of Two Cities.  She adorns her desk with winter roses and supplements her literature lesson with artwork that captures the same mood, setting, or character as the novel her students have read.  Nancy's own particular brand of alchemy turns language into art as her students seek to conceptualize works by creating physical images which she suspends from the ceiling and hangs on the walls. Nancy is a risk-taker, as she confronts head-on adolescent problems of alienation, loneliness, and personal tragedy.  She rewards courage in its many forms, for Nancy is herself courageous in her vision of what education should be.    What Do You Think?: Send an e- mail to editor@fairlawnnews.com or post a message on the Fair Lawn News Discussion Forum.