Advice from Teacher Fred: "Pass It On"

Advice from Teacher Fred: “Pass It On”

by Elizabeth Spagnoletti OPC ’08

“You have to be interested yourself as a teacher, help kids along and ask questions that lead them to make a discovery. That’s the heart of it.”

September 1972: A young, newlywed teacher walks to Penn Charter’s campus from his apartment in Germantown. He greets his students (all male), teaches his classes, advises his clubs, then walks home. Eight years pass. The teacher trades in the hike for what becomes his iconic bicycle: 33 years later, he can still be seen pedaling from his Mt. Airy home to campus – partly as exercise, partly as political statement.

It’s been 41 years since Fred Huntington – better known as Teacher Fred – attended his first Commencement, for the Class of 1973. He will march with faculty for the last time this June, for the graduation of the Class of 2013. Teacher Fred is retiring. Reflecting on this venerable teacher, Nathan J. Blum OPC ’80 reveals what is at the essence of Huntington’s teaching, describing Huntington as the type of teacher who “enjoyed being with you – in the classroom, in fun activities – he just wanted to spend time with you.”

Fred Huntington, a.k.a. Teacher Fred, will retire after four decades of talking about literature, listening to the language and nurturing curiosity.

After four decades, Huntington deserves a chance to reflect on this venerable institution and how much (or little) Penn Charter has truly changed.

“There has been a momentous shift at almost every level,” Huntington said, citing heightened expectations, increased enrollment and coeducation as primary examples.

“Having girls around has humanized the male culture,” Huntington said. While he remains skeptical that Penn Charter was, as he has heard others claim, “rougher-edged” when it was all male, he does believe that since Penn Charter became fully coed in 1980, the school is a more pleasant place to be and to teach. He believes girls have pushed the academic standard of excellence with their interest in scholarship and “willingness to enter into the school as an academic place.” New technology might make another teacher’s list of important changes, but not Huntington’s. He can remember a time when he felt at the forefront of what was happening technologically, and though he sees its positive effects, he believes PC’s English Department is not overly technological. “Gradually, I’ve found the essence of what happens in an English classroom is not aided by technology,” he said. “The heart of it is to talk about literature, to listen to the language, and to read the language aloud.”

Though more recent graduates of Penn Charter remember Huntington as faculty advisor of The Mirror, Penn Charter’s studentrun newspaper, some of the “old guard” may remember Teacher Fred for his leadership in the Outdoor Skills Club. Huntington recalled, with great fondness, their rock-climbing trips – “two times a week, sometimes on weekends” – and winter camping trips. “When we were climbing,” he said, “we were all in it together.”

Blum, now a doctor at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, remembers when he and seven other students drove out to the Wind River Range in Wyoming, led by an intrepid Huntington and Don Campbell, another PC teacher. They spent three summer weeks in this idyllic location far from Philadelphia, climbing and hiking on adventures Blum remembers as “fantastic.”

Campbell also recalls those trips and one moment in particular when he stood on a bank with Huntington and Blum, watching in disbelief and fascination, while the remaining students fashioned a raft out of logs and climbing gear and bravely paddled their way across a seemingly impenetrable lake. The Outdoor Skills Club, Campbell said, gave the boys “opportunities to be wild, to test themselves, to get really scared.”

As much as Teacher Fred enjoyed those days, he has remained open to new experiences and adventures. In March 2012, Huntington chaperoned a group of PC students on a trip to Penn Charter’s sister school in Tianjin, China, where social studies teacher Ed Marks was in residence on sabbatical. The eight PC students were a wonderful and diverse group, Huntington said, including an American girl who is a native speaker of Chinese; two African-American students; one student who is half Cuban, half Israeli; and a one-year exchange student from Palestine.

“It was a real mix of folk. When we’d leave restaurants, partly because of the mixture of colors and nationalities we had in our group and partly because we were in Tianjin, which is not a very sophisticated city, everything in the restaurant would stop. People would just stare at us as we walked out. So, that was kind of fun,” Huntington recalled.

Penn Charter’s growing diversity is a change Huntington applauds: “It’s a wonderful thing to see.”

Mirror, Mirror

“The purpose of a mirror is to reflect,” wrote the editors in the January 2013 issue of The Mirror, “an action that is taken very seriously here at Penn Charter. We reflect in Meeting for Worship, advisory, even during classes. Reflection seems to always be the first step in any process that is undertaken at school.”

As fearless a leader as he was for the Outdoor Skills Club, Huntington has led The Mirror just as fearlessly for the past 20 years as faculty advisor. He brought to the task some experience as “cub reporter” for the Troy Record, the local paper of his hometown, Troy, N.Y. “I would dash around and cover business meetings and stuff like that,” he said of his first experiences in journalism. “So, I always had an interest in the process of what a newspaper tries to do.”

What does Huntington believe The Mirror tries to do? “I’d like it to serve the purpose of laying out issues we tend not to talk about,” he explained, “to give voices to people who don’t get their voices heard.”

He staunchly believes that same reflective process should also happen inside the classroom. “Education is about self-discovery,” Huntington said, adding that he wants students to try to understand themselves through the characters they encounter in literature and their discussions about those characters. “That person makes a horrible mistake, and you reflect on that; you don’t immediately distance yourself,” he said. “That’s what it’s about: Through another character, you’re able to talk about things that are important.”

A Quaker Education

A graduate of Kenyon College, Huntington became a teacher for several reasons. The first, he noted, was because his father was a teacher. While his father may have primed Huntington for his professional career, the idea of becoming a teacher did not take a real hold until he was drafted into the U.S. Army. Stationed at Fort Gordon in Augusta, Ga., Huntington worked in the Signal Corps and was made an instructor in cryptology. He discovered he had a penchant for teaching, and when the military gave him the opportunity for early leave if he went into education – either as a teacher or a student – he took it.

Huntington taught at Blair Academy, in New Jersey, for three years before coming to Penn Charter. Save for a year abroad at Leighton Park School, a Friends school in Reading, England, Penn Charter has been Huntington’s second home ever since.

“You have to have an open-minded, questioning attitude about what life has to offer. And you have to be willing to explore other things. It’s an attitude of mind that you train yourself into doing so that you can teach yourself whatever it is you need to learn.”

As an educator, Huntington feels his focus is to nurture curiosity within his students. He understands an educator as one who is not so concerned about the particular subject matter he or she teaches as long as the students see each class as an attempt to investigate something. He cites his Advanced English class this year as an example of genuinely curious students who “bought into the complexity of Hamlet” and were willing to take the material seriously.

Huntington believes in the seriousness and sanctity of the liberal arts and a classical education, and he defines education as openmindedness. “You have to have an open-minded, questioning attitude about what life has to offer. And you have to be willing to explore other things. It’s an attitude of mind that you train yourself into doing so that you can teach yourself whatever it is you need to learn. If you’re willing to do that, it’s not this material or that material or anything; it’s an openness to new experiences.”

Methods of fostering that mindset of curiosity have not significantly changed for Huntington. “You have to be interested yourself as a teacher – help kids along and ask questions that lead them to make a discovery,” he said. “That’s the heart of it.”

In Tianjin, Huntington was fascinated to witness students’ classroom experiences: “They’re very traditional, obviously, and they’ll have 50, 60 kids in a class all the time. There’s almost no time for any kind of student-teacher response; it’s all from the teacher to the student. So, it was very different.”

Through his four-decade perspective, Huntington has seen much change – but observed one facet of Penn Charter that has remained steadfast: the student-teacher relationships. “Kids and faculty get on really well,” he said. “There’s a kind of understanding; they share a sense of purpose … There’s a kind of mutual respect that we’ve agreed that what’s happened here has bearing and is worth continuing. That’s the thing I think is really good and has remained true.”

Huntington’s former students are evidence that Huntington himself has contributed to this tradition. Blum recalls Huntington as the kind of teacher who wanted to engage you inside and outside the classroom. Rachel Dowling OPC ’06, former Mirror editor-in-chief, remembers Huntington’s willingness to share The Mirror office – which doubles as Huntington’s personal office – with her and her co-editor, Gus Sacks OPC ’06. “He let us paint the walls and turn the place into a Mirror home, to escape the crowded PC halls,” Dowling said.

As he readies himself for his next adventure, Huntington challenges those now at Penn Charter and those who have graduated from its halls to “pass it on.” He takes this phrase from The History Boys, a play he teaches in his beloved Contemporary Drama elective. “The most important thing is to pass it on – not only the love of literature and the love of asking questions but pass on the culture and the enthusiasm for asking questions and so on,” he concluded. “I think that’s the only thing worth saying.”