Sister Carlotta Distinguished Service Award: Dr. Nancy Hunt

English Teacher, Grades 9 and 12

The Sister Carlotta Distinguished Service Award is presented annually to a faculty or staff member whose work, either inside or outside the classroom, has epitomized the school’s mission and has enriched the hearts and minds of students at Santa Catalina School. The recipient is recognized for upholding the school’s commitment to educating the whole person, consistent with the values manifested in Sister Carlotta’s vocation of teaching young people.

The nominating committee and Board of Trustees Chair Laura Lyon Gaon ’81 accept nominations from faculty and staff and make recommendations to the Board of Trustees, who then select the recipient. The Sister Carlotta Endowment for Educational Excellence provides a $10,000 honorarium that accompanies the award.

For a measure of just how much Dr. Nancy Hunt deserved the Sister Carlotta Distinguished Service Award, consider this: The day after she received the award, students revealed that the 2022–23 yearbook was dedicated to her. Dr. Hunt met the back-to-back news with characteristic humor. “I’ve been telling people if I don’t get a standing ovation when I walk in a room, I’m leaving.” She was joking, but after 26 years of teaching English at Catalina, a standing ovation is not out of the question. In the classroom and in the dorms, Dr. Hunt has touched the lives of thousands of students through her warmth, encouragement, and engaging lessons—not to mention baked goods and tea.

Whether she is teaching The Odyssey to freshmen or Shakespeare to seniors, Dr. Hunt’s enthusiasm for her subject shines through. “Teaching English is fun—I mean, it’s really fun,” she says. “But I also think it’s important. Storytelling isn’t just entertaining. It’s how we teach people to be good, how we teach people to think about their identity, think about the past and the future, how communities work, what we could do better, how we can imagine greatness and compassion...It’s one of the best ways to think about how to be. We talk about characters, but we also talk about character, who you are.”

Dr. Hunt also taught creative writing for many years and served as a member of the resident faculty until 2018. In her long career at Catalina, certain traditions have cropped up around her: drawing the story of Odysseus’s journey in stick figures on the white board, carving pumpkins and sipping apple cider on Greer Patio, enjoying a cup of tea in her classroom.

Dr. Hunt is not afraid to mix things up, though, and she regularly finds new avenues for her students to engage with the material. As she explains, “It’s really important as a teacher to be flexible. A lot of teaching is about relationships between you and the text, you and the kids, and the kids and the text. There are lots of ways to supplement and enrich that, and a lot of the time the students know best what those will be.”

Teaching freshmen and seniors—and this year serving as the senior class dean—Dr. Hunt understands the needs of students at the beginning and end of their high school journeys. For freshmen, it’s laying the foundation for academic success and putting skills in place that will serve them for years to come. For seniors, it’s giving them more agency in their learning and setting them up for the next phase of their lives.

That’s where the tea comes in. “There’s a level of relaxation in the class that I’m after,” she explains. “I want them to sit down, take a deep breath, and be with these people, in this space, to talk about this play, not thinking about college applications or the million other things they have going on. I want them to learn to do that in their own lives.”

For their part, students feel the level of care that Dr. Hunt has for them. In the yearbook dedication, they expressed gratitude for “her genuine kindness and support, ability to put a smile on our faces, and for her consistently rooting for her students in all of their endeavors. Dr. Hunt, you are truly the best!”

Dr. Hunt on…

Shakespeare

“If you only taught Shakespeare, I think you could teach all of the humanities; he’s a gateway to a discussion of philosophy, government, religion, human nature, psychology.”

Required reading

“Some of the texts I teach, it’s not about whether students like them or not. Reading hard things prepares them to be in the world. You have to sign contracts, read your lease, do your taxes—there are a lot of things you read that aren’t fun, and teaching them to do that now is just a responsibility of raising kids.”

Her love of books

“There were many books that grabbed me growing up: Little Women, The Secret Garden, Charlotte’s Web. But I may have learned to love books because people read to me at school and at home. I still like it when people tell me stories.”