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"Seeing the Light": Weston Award Winner Greg Woodruff

Woodruff, one of the 2011 Weston Award recipients from MHS, was named the NJ "Humanities Teacher of the Year" in 2010

Greg Woodruff doesn’t like to blow his own horn. If you’ve really had an impact on people, he reasons, they’ll say something about it.

That’s certainly held true for the lauded MHS teacher, who in 2010 was named “Humanities Teacher of the Year” by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities (NJCH).  This year, he’s among 17 Weston winners, 4 of which hail from Montclair High – including Spanish teacher Monica Lavosky, AP History teacher Jonathan Meyer, and Architecture teacher Pamela Shakespeare.

Parents and PTA representatives from the district’s 11 schools whittled their final list from a whopping 450 nominations submitted by parents, guardians, and students themselves.

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Woodruff made the cut.

“It means a lot,” he says of his first Weston win. “It’s a public recognition of the care I take to give students a great experience, no matter what course I teach. I try to take certain risks in the classroom to further their understanding of true things, and to find in themselves the answers to some questions that will  

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“Future” for most students in Woodruff’s two courses – Humanities, and Philosophy & Composition – involves 2-4 years at an undergraduate institution. Woodruff's students' rigorous curriculum – packed with high-level assignments – reflects these expectations.

 “Reading Dante is not considered ‘beach reading’,” says Woodruff, who has taught at MHS since 1998. “The Iliad, Plato, the Prince by Machiavelli – these are not easy texts.” He adds that students are also assigned about a hundred pages of reading a week – and that every reading assignment is accompanied by a written assignment.

Sure, this requires an awful lot of processing – and reading – of papers. But Woodruff insists that meeting regularly with students to give them feedback is a basic entitlement.

 “I get to speak to students specifically about their strengths in papers, what they want to improve, and what they need to improve, so I’m able to tailor writing instruction literally to each student’s needs,” he says.

Of course, Woodruff’s coursework doesn’t solely involve leafing through texts, or putting pen to paper. Just ask Eli Wright – a former student who worked closely with Woodruff on MHS’ Phoenix Art & Literary Magazine.

"Taking a class with Mr. Woodruff isn't merely reading books or writing papers,” says Wright, a rising sophomore at Oberlin College. “It’s about preparing the mind to think, and learning by doing this.”

Woodruff calls this “experiential learning” – an old-fashioned idea that’s firmly anchored his educational approach. “You don’t learn unless you go through the experience of ‘coming to understand’,” he says. “I try to design all my lessons around students coming to understand what the subject is, what writing is. They have to actively be learning, and doing it themselves.”  

For Woodruff, this entails everything from peer review – where students evaluate their classmates’ work – to creating masks that visualize students’ understanding of characters in Greek Drama. He also offers a “design-your-own” midterm, encouraging Humanities students to research – and creatively convey – any concept relating to the ancient or medieval world that they haven’t covered in class. The results, he insists, have been stellar.  

He recalls a senior who shot a movie based on parts of the Iliad using a war game video component.  “[The student] had to build, through computer language, different features that the game didn’t supply – chariots, for instance – and he added in a soundtrack and dialogue. It was very successful – the amount of work that went into this was phenomenal.”               

Still, Woodruff insists the most rewarding aspect of teaching is having kids visibly understand something.

“There’s usually an expression on their face, that they’ve ‘got it’ – that a light bulb has gone on,” he says. “You can see kids making connections, not just with material in the class, but with their lives outside of class.”

 

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