Four Generations of Teaching at Woodgrove

During the course of a typical school day, your hardworking English teacher sometimes needs to amuse his students with a delightful fun fact. 

“Did you know,” I tell the class, “that there are four generations of teachers at Woodgrove?” 

They stare back at me with a mixture of confusion and concern at my enthusiasm.

I elaborate:  

“Did you know that science teacher Ms. Bartling was taught history at Woodgrove by Mr. Skinner, who was taught history at Park View by Dr. Shipp, who was taught chemistry at Valley by Mr. Spicer?”  

Oh, how nice, they observe. Very good. What exactly does this have to do with English class, Mr. Scott? 

Ignoring their question, I ask them to complete a Google Form, which asks them quantify anonymously just how impressive they found this factoid. 

They rated it an average 6.6 out of 10, with a median of 7. (Who says kids these days are totally brainrotted?) 

My follow-up question (“What does it say about Woodgrove that there are four generations of teachers?”) included the following responses, which span the spectrum of teenage perceptiveness found in an anonymous setting: 

People like teaching at woodgrove

it’s a school that is loyal to the teachers and is a nurturing environment that is so tightly knit  

it is a small world

That woodgrove is such a great school because they have past students coming back to teach. 

It has a rich culture.

We have a good family tree.

idk

not sure…….

It says that people are very connected.

It is very interesting that Woodgrove hasn’t been around for very long but we have teachers who have taught other teachers

a sense of community in the school because there are 4 generations

I think it’s interesting that people moved around schools to end up at Woodgrove

Must be pretty sick

I agree with all these answers, to various extents.

I’m not sure when or where I first learned about this family tree of teaching, but if I had to guess it was probably from my erstwhile colleague Lea Longerbeam, who knows her Woodgrove lore. 

For teacher appreciation week, I talked to all four of them about their experience teaching and being taught/coached by their now-colleagues.

Perhaps projecting my own high school experiences on them, I first asked if any of them were remembered as a less-than-amazing student, hunting for some entertaining, embarrassing stories.

It was a fruitless hunt.  

“Good student – organized,” Mr. Skinner said of Amber Bartling when I spoke to him outside his homeroom last Wednesday. “Even back then, she seemed to have those qualities that I think teachers have. She was always on top of her work, always on top of her assignments, you know, balanced. I’m a big college football fan. She’s a big Georgia fan. So we would talk about the Bulldogs.” 

Bartling’s most vivid memory of Skinner’s class had nothing to do with football. “I have like one specific super vivid memory. We were still given final exams back then. [Skinner] told us he was going to give us a blank map of the world and assign us twenty random countries. You have to identify the country and the capital of that country. So I had come up with like a bunch of these little mnemonics to remember countries. I still know the capital of Portugal is Lisbon and I still know the capital of Iceland is Reykjavik and all these things. But I know for a fact I did not do well on that exam. I’m a science/math person. I was struggling in that class. And somehow I got an 80% and I just know that he had to have cut me some slack. Like, there is no way I earned an 80% on that exam. And later I was just like, ‘you know, Mr. Skinner, I really appreciate it.’ And he just laughed and was like, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’”

“Andy Skinner was an excellent history student,” Dr. Shipp said in his office when I spoke to him on Tuesday. “I remember that well. Very good writer.” Dr. Shipp at the time was only in his second year of teaching history at Park View High School.

About teaching a young Dr. Shipp, Coach Spicer smiled and offered a summation that was pithy and very on-brand for Spicer. “He was very typical for athletes. He was very bright and he did what he was told.”

Coach Spicer not only had Dr. Shipp as a student in chemistry, but also as a member of the track team, which Spicer coached at the time: “He was an 800 [meter] runner.” Spicer gave a measured pause then nodded, “A good 800 runner.”

What did they remember about the classroom and the class routines of their now-colleagues? 

“He’s always been coaching,” Ms. Bartling said of Mr. Skinner, who coaches wrestling. “So I have this really vivid memory of him always having sports equipment and stuff in the room. There was always something going on, which is funny now because that’s how my room is. I’m sure the kids are like, there’s always something softball happening.”

A 2017 Woodgrove graduate, Bartling played softball for Coach Spicer.

“He told me when I was in high school — he looked at me one day and he was like, you know, I think one day we’ll be in a coaching staff together. I just have to think you’ll be back here. And I was like, ‘what are you talking about?  No way.'”

Bartling paused. “Of course, he’s always right.”

After graduating, Bartling managed softball with Spicer.

“One time he cracked a clipboard over his knee and he just turned around and handed it to me and was like, ‘take this.’ And I was like, what am I supposed to do with this broken clipboard?”

Of Mr. Shipp’s classroom, Andy Skinner has more peaceful memories.

“I remember [in Dr. Shipp’s] classroom there were handprints on the wall,” Mr. Skinner said. “I don’t know if that was from him or a previous teacher, but I remember the decorations of the room.”  

(I followed up with Dr. Shipp about this. He revealed that the decorations were there thanks to the former classroom’s occupant – coincidentally, Joe Spicer’s wife, Louise, who taught history. “When I moved into Park View, she had transitioned to Loudoun Valley,” said Shipp. “I had her classroom for five years.”)

“[Shipp] was super organized, as you can imagine,” said Skinner. “Very good teacher. He’s actually one of the reasons that I got into teaching, especially for social sciences. I still remember this – we did a cool lesson on feudalism where we actually played blackjack.”

Going to school in a pre-Promethean board era, Skinner remembered the painstaking work Shipp took to get the notes on the board before school started. “He would put all of his notes up on the blackboard with the chalk. When we came in, it was up there ready to go for when he started getting into the content.”

When I asked Skinner if he ever talked with Shipp about this experience, he said the topic comes up occasionally, for practical reasons. “I’ve actually a couple times asked him [for feedback on a lesson] back when I taught world history about some of the stuff that we used to do – like, hey, do you remember this lesson?”

Dr. Shipp remembered that when he taught history at Park View, the curriculum was slightly different. “When I started teaching, world history was taught in one year. That was a challenge. I can still remember my assistant principal saying to a number of us who were new that year at Park View when we first started embarking upon the year – her request at that point in time was just to try to get to the present day.”

About Spicer’s classroom environment at Loudoun Valley High School, Shipp had fond memories.

“I remember just enjoying [Coach Spicer’s chemistry class],” Dr. Shipp said. “I knew his sense of humor. I had a couple good friends in there. It was always a fun class.” 

Coach Spicer remembered one particular source of diversion for Dr. Shipp and his pals: “[Shipp] was in a class with a bunch of athletes,” said Spicer. “They were rambunctious, the whole bunch of them. And we were talking about this the other day – [Loudoun Valley High School] didn’t have air conditioning. So there would be a big battle for who got the seat near the window. It was always hot.”

“Yeah, there was no AC,” said Dr. Shipp when I brought this up with him. “That’s where I find it interesting today. If we lose power [at Woodgrove], we’ll get more calls about that than other issues. Yet most of these parents, myself included, went through schools that had no AC. And that was just normal.”

Are there similarities between the four of them? 

Skinner immediately pointed out a common trait: “We’re all organized. The structure of how class is set up [is similar amongst them]. 

Dr. Shipp had a more attitude-based response: “I think we all want the best. I think we’re all like and appreciate and are grateful for the opportunity to help people.”

“I think every one of them is a can-get-things-done person,” said Spicer. “None of them are braggadocious about themselves. They’re all just kind of get-the-job-done-guys and all very efficient and all very good with people. That’s the commonality that I see.” 

 “I think we all love this community, ” said Bartling. “There’s not a single one of us that only does one thing. We all teach, we all coach [Shipp coached track during his history-teaching years], we all sponsor a club.”

The other day I saw Lea Longerbeam, who was back at school to help proctor tests. I asked if she could articulate what makes the four generations so significant, if it’s significant at all — I was having trouble putting it into words. 

Longerbeam had no problem explaining its value.

“I think a strength of the county through the years was that there was such a respect for the system that people who grew up within the system and had parents as educators often did go into the field themselves,” she said. “And three of these four people had parents who worked as educators or at least as staff members in the school system. I think that’s good for both the school and the school system, and I don’t think you see quite as much of that anymore.”

It might not be as common to see former students rushing back to work in their alma mater, but at Woodgrove, it’s still very much the norm. 

For example, the other day I was adding to my classroom wardrobe some random old Woodgrove shirts that had been gifted to me by Ms. Sim. In walked Matthew Spears-Heinel, who teaches American History in my room during the seventh block. Spears-Heinel noticed the ‘14 senior shirt and proudly found his name listed on the back. 

Indeed, there are students in college who are already planning for the day they might get to come back to work at Woodgrove.  

“I’m a teacher cadet advisor,” said Bartling, “so I get a cadet from the graduating class in LCPS, and this year I got assigned a Woodgrove graduate. She told me the other day, ‘my dream is to teach environmental science and coach lacrosse at Woodgrove.’ Which is so funny to me because…That would just add right to what we’ve all done.”

***

Thanks to Spicer, Shipp, Skinner, and Bartling for participating in this writeup. Thanks also to my first block class for their help in proofreading and gathering photos, as well as the library staff of Loudoun Valley for letting me visit and look through their yearbooks, and also the library staff at Park View for their help.