Longtime educator still loves teens, teaching

Many teachers remember their first year in the classroom with a slight shudder. Mary Sullivan remembers hers with a smile.

It was 1968 in Tacoma, Wash.

Sullivan lived with three other new teachers and taught high school English. That fall, the Tacoma School District had started taking significant steps toward ending the de facto segregation in its schools. Sullivan’s school had just one black student in its white population the year before she started teaching there.

Forty-two years later, Sullivan, 63, isn’t sure if it was the support from the friends she lived with or the exciting time she worked in that made her first year of teaching so enjoyable.

“I’ve often said, had I been smarter, I would have had a harder time, but I loved my first year,” Sullivan said. “I just thought it was exciting.”

Now an English teacher at Bigfork High School, Sullivan still finds excitement in her career. She was recognized recently as an outstanding teacher; the Montana Professional Teaching Foundation named her a finalist for the 2011 Montana Teacher of the Year Award.

Sullivan has taught at Bigfork High School for 20 years, but her history in the Flathead Valley goes back much further. She was born and raised here, as was her father, who graduated from Flathead County High School in 1928, and her grandmother, Annie (Gangner) Docksteader, who graduated from eighth grade at Central School in Kalispell and who was, Sullivan said, the first white child born in Flathead County.

After she graduated from Bigfork High School, Sullivan earned her undergraduate degree in English at Carroll College.

She and a group of young women then went to Spokane to interview with school administrators from across the Northwest and West Coast. She and three friends took jobs in Tacoma and Sullivan headed west to begin her career.

Sullivan worked in Tacoma for 11 years, first as an English teacher and then as a librarian and administrator. It was while working for the district that she met her husband, Paul.

Sullivan had helped write an application for a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The organization agreed to give the district $25,000 and Tacoma conducted a nationwide search for a director that brought Paul Sullivan from Massachusetts.

The Sullivans wanted to return to Montana to get into the Christmas tree business with Mary’s father in Bigfork. But the closest they could get was Missoula, where Paul took a job at the University of Montana and Mary taught eighth-grade English at Hellgate Elementary.

In 1981, Sullivan quit teaching to take care of her son, Paul Jr. When he was 5 months old, doctors found a malignant tumor in his chest. He had surgery in Salt Lake City, but surgeons had to leave vestiges of the cancer in his tiny body.

“We brought him home, hoping that he could cure himself of the remaining cancer,” Sullivan said. “I was teaching at that point, but we said, ‘How could we expect our baby to cure himself of cancer at daycare?’”

With his mother at home, Paul Jr. did get better, and before long was joined by a baby sister, Maureen. Sullivan stayed home with her children for 10 years, until Maureen was ready to start kindergarten.

“She and I went to school together,” Sullivan said.

By this time, the family had moved to Bigfork, and Sullivan started teaching at her alma mater.

Since then, Sullivan has tried to bring literature to life. When her students read Norman Maclean’s “A River Runs Through It,” they visit Missoula to see the places described in the book. After reading Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” her students interviewed Vietnam veterans and spoke at a Veterans Day assembly.

Some of those ideas about engaging her students stemmed from professional development opportunities Sullivan gained through a Montana Heritage Project grant. For 10 years, the grant allowed Sullivan to travel to workshops and conventions that enhanced her skills as a teacher.

Until this year, Sullivan taught junior English. But because of declining enrollment and a smaller staff in Bigfork, she is also teaching eighth-grade English this year.

The biggest changes she has seen in her long career have been technological. In 1968, the Tacoma district’s one computer filled an entire room “and it didn’t do anything compared to what my laptop will do today,” Sullivan said. Her hands and clothes are no longer stained purple from the ditto machine, and her students can stay in their desks to interact with information on a computerized whiteboard in the classroom.

The changes don’t worry her, she said. Even though her students probably aren’t using correct spelling and grammar when they text, they’re still doing well on writing tests. Last year’s junior class scored higher on the Montana University System writing assessment than any Class AA or Class A school in the state, she said.

Bigfork’s average of 4.4 out of 6 tied the school with Manhattan, another Class B school, said Jan Clinard, director of academic initiatives with the Montana University System.

One thing that hasn’t changed is Sullivan’s affection for her students.

“I thought teenagers were great when I was a teenager. I thought they were great in 1968 when I started teaching. And I still think teenagers are great today,” she said.

Reporter Kristi Albertson may be reached at 758-4438 or at kalbertson@dailyinterlake.com.