Lowell — On a snowy January morning, students in English teacher Shelley Swift’s Lit and Film class watched Elsa thaw Anna’s frozen heart in the final few moments of the movie “Frozen.”
Days before, the class read Hans Christian Andersen’s 1844 fairy tale “The Snow Queen,” upon which the Disney blockbuster is loosely based.
In response, students will create projects mashing up both tales in digital storyboards or thematic collages, offering their own unique twists, Swift explained. An example?
“They could combine the two stories together where a modern Gerda (a main character in “The Snow Queen”) and Elsa and Anna team up to fight climate change,” Swift said.
Welcome to Swift’s classroom where students are learning about film and its ties to literature, along with techniques like camera angle and sound.
After 34 years at Lowell High School, Swift has taught more than 8,000 students. She is now enjoying the opportunity to take on the elective, challenging students to connect works like “Tin Star” and “High Noon”, “We Can Remember it for You Wholesale” and “Total Recall” and the short story “The Birds” and Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic movie of the same title.
‘What’s not amazing about high school kids?’
— Lowell High School English teacher Shelley Swift
After students polished off their popcorn and headed to their next classes, Swift sat down with School News Network to talk about teaching high school students for more than three decades.
Why do you teach? Swift, who also teaches AP English Language and Composition, English 10 and Freshman English, often recognizes faces that are unmistakably children of students she had years ago
“The kids. I’m here for the kids,” she said. “It also feeds my curiosity. I enjoy learning, obviously. I’ve been in school since I was 5. I learn a lot from the kids every day. I learn a lot about myself just doing this, because every hour, every year, is different.”
What gets you up in the morning and excited to be here? “The kids. my colleagues and my curiosity. It is all the same.”
What do you like most about teaching English? “Film and Lit is new (for me) this year. I’ve never taught it before, so the challenge of crafting a new class is always fun. Over the course of the years I have had opportunities to teach lots of different things, so it’s the challenge of figuring how to make things relevant and interesting to the kids and also accessible to them, and being able to use my own creativity to make sure that I am delivering the things that are required.
“The kids always ask ‘How do you stand teaching the same things year after year?’ You have to look for new things, and every year the kids notice things that are different from (what they noticed) the year before; there are different things happening in society that (make them) look at pieces of literature differently.”
What are some of the biggest challenges in your role, and how do you strive to meet them? “Probably for me, not getting caught up in all of the minutiae of things — grading papers and giving feedback and contacting parents.
“While that’s important, it’s really easy to get caught up in doing all those duties that are required as a teacher, while forgetting that I have 25 to 30 human beings with thoughts and dreams and feelings who need me to hear those. And they need to share those with each other. We need to build a classroom community, so it’s far more important that I pay attention to that.
“The papers will get graded, the parents will get contacted, curriculum will get changed and all those kinds of things, but I only get (a finite amount of time) to build those connections and relationships with kids. It’s really important to capitalize on that.”
What do you find amazing about high school students? “What’s not amazing about high school kids? I would much prefer to work with teenagers, because they are passionate. They have a lot of energy. There is an optimism to them that kind of gets boiled out of us as we get older. I love their energy and their positivity. They are just so dang interested in everything. Who doesn’t want to work around people who are like that? It’s never boring.”
What would you say to someone considering teaching as a profession? “You need to be prepared to work hard. This is a tough job. It’s not a 7:30 to 2:40 job. You are going to put in a lot more time. Summers off is a myth. There are plenty of things to do (during the summer), whether it’s taking college classes toward another degree, working with colleagues or preparing for classes, whether it’s for new classes or to improve what you did the year before.
“It’s also (a) human business, so you need a lot of patience to deal with students who are coming from different backgrounds and cultures, and they are coming with all of their thoughts and feelings on a daily basis. You definitely need to be patient and know that building relationships with kids is going to take time, and you’re not always going to make a connection with every single kid.
“You have to be really brave, because you are going to make a lot of mistakes. (Be) willing to admit that you don’t know things, and apologize when you mess up. I’ve found that when I’ve been able to do that, kids are very forgiving and they actually have a great deal of respect when they realize you don’t know everything. You are just like them. You are still trying to figure things out.”
Over the past three-plus decades, how have your job and you changed? “Definitely technology. (When I started) I was still working with an overhead projector — putting those little transparencies on an overhead! Obviously, a lot of stuff is now done on the computer and the kids have computers. Technology has changed a lot.
“Generally speaking, kids have not changed. They still are excited and enthusiastic about their world. They have their own passions; they also have fears. They want to belong, they want people to care about them, they want to be successful (and) they want to build great lives for themselves. None of that has changed.
“For me, I’ve probably become a lot more patient with myself. It’s OK to make those mistakes. At the beginning, you don’t want anyone to know that you don’t know things, especially when you are not that much older than the students you are teaching.”
What other insights do you have about teaching? Swift and her father, a retired middle school principal, often talk about the unknown in teaching, and the hope that their impact is more positive than negative.
“A good reminder to all of us as teachers is that we don’t always know the impact we have on the people we work with. A surgeon can go in and fix a knee and then someone’s knee works better … the surgeon can see that direct result. We don’t always see that. Kids leave our lives and they graduate and they go off, and unless they contact us, we have no idea what kind of an impact we have — good or bad.
“That’s the most difficult part of being a teacher: we don’t really know the impact that we have long term.”
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