LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Mintonye Elementary teachers started their Monday off with misty eyes after Tippecanoe School Corp. educator Kathy Nimmer’s moving speech, one of many she’s giving on her farewell tour as she prepares to retire at the end of the month.
Nimmer, Indiana Teacher of the Year in 2015 and a finalist for National Teacher of the Year, gave the educators parting advice as they were seated around tables in the Mintonye library.
She also paired the advice with one of her most memorable stories from her time touring Indiana schools after her Teacher of the Year award.
That story wasn’t about the standing ovations she received, or the awards and trophies she was presented. It was about an encounter with a young student who was slowly going blind — much as Nimmer did as a young student.
Between sessions with Decatur Township students, Nimmer said a teacher tapped her on the arm and asked whether Nimmer would be able to offer the girl, a fourth grader at the time, some words of encouragement. Nimmer said she asked the girl what her favorite color was, to which she responded “blue, sky blue.” She told the girl to look at the sky as much as she could, asking her to burn the image of the sky into her head and her heart so she could never lose it.
Two weeks later, Nimmer said she received an envelope in the mail with a blue-beaded bracelet and a note that said, “Thank you for giving me the sky.”
After 32 years of educating both students and teachers at TSC, Nimmer said the moment of saying goodbyes and thank you’s to her TSC family was bittersweet. But she doesn’t plan to go far. The Journal & Courier sat down with Nimmer, and her guide dog Tate, on one of her final days as she makes her way through the goodbyes.
Tell me a little bit about your teaching career; has the entirety of it been here at TSC?
Yes, from the very beginning. I came down here for my master’s degree at Purdue and started teaching here at Harrison in 1992 and have never left TSC. I was in the English department at Harrison from ’92 up until the time when I became the 2015 Indiana Teacher of the Year. Then I technically had a one-year sabbatical while working for the Indiana Department of Education, and then when I came back, I taught for half of the day and then helped new teachers informally the other half of the day. That was a handshake of beautiful circumstances from the Teacher of the Year experience that I really developed my teacher leadership skills.
When I was coming back that year off the sabbatical, Dr. Hanback and Dr. DeLong sat down with me and were picking my brain about how I could translate some of my experiences from teacher of the year to benefit the district. Their concern at that time was for the growing shortage of candidates and finding support for teachers, and all of that lined up with my heart wanting to do something like that. That became a hybrid role for me, and then right around COVID, the district decided they needed a full-blown program, which was very intuitive there to know a crisis was about to blossom, and that’s when SEEDS (a program for first-year teachers) was developed, which I have been director of ever since.
That’s quite rare nowadays to stay at one district to make a career out of it.
Yes. I think many of the new teachers I am supporting, we want them to stay, we want them to grow, and we have an impact on those things. Very few would enter a school and think they will retire in that same place. There’s more options, there’s opportunities, there’s complexity of the education landscape. I think even in my generation, it wasn’t always that somebody stayed in the same place all the way through. But certainly, now it’s even more true.
What are some of those first-year challenges that you experienced as a new teacher?
Oh, a huge challenges. So every new teacher is obviously a novice and struggles with classroom management. What was bigger for me was that I was blind and my students were sighted, and I did not have the answers figured out very quickly of how to bridge that gap. I tried to minimize the difference, tried to kind of stifle things that were a little different because I was blind, and that ended up creating a not great classroom. I lectured a lot, I didn’t move around a lot, and I wasn’t playful or interactive with them. They were choices I’d made to try to minimize the fact that I couldn’t see them, but they were choices that created a classroom that was not warm, interactive or bonded.
That all culminated hugely when two of my kids were horsing around, and one threw a book bag for the other to catch, which the other missed, and the book bag slammed into my classroom window, and it shattered. Everyone came running in, and I was standing there with my hands on my face and wished that I could just disappear. It happened right before spring break, and I went home and just cried and tried to wrestle with what I should do. When we came back from break, I decided to just change how my whole demeanor in the classroom was for April and May, because I wasn’t sure I would be renewed anyways. I started to settle into my natural self, which is silly and warm and energetic and a little theatrical, and all those changes started to happen. My administration saw the changes and gave me one more year, and I never looked back. So even though I felt like I could die from the shattering of that window, and everyone knowing my failure, that was a turning point for me, and I look at that now as a blessing that the old ways shattered and I was given a second chance.
That’s a really beautiful way to look at it. How do you get the new, sighted educators to relate to that experience you had?
My biggest strength in leading SEEDS is my empathy. When they are struggling in their early parts of their career, it may not be the exact same struggles I had, but a struggle is a struggle, and hard is hard. I don’t sweep into their classroom and act like I can fix. I listen well, I ask questions, and I help them find their way through it by encouraging them. Had I not struggled at the beginning of my career, and then I am now leading a new teacher support program, there wouldn’t be a lot of credibility in that. For me, it’s a perfect bookend from starting my career in a hard place and then finishing my K-12 career where I am helping others walk through their hard places.
Along with forces inside a classroom, there are a lot of external forces for teachers in state and federal government that can be hard to navigate. With a new governor and a new president incoming, there are a lot of ideas floating around right now. How do you get teachers to hold on to their classrooms despite all of that?
There’s always students. And the thing is, the students are looking up at the teacher in front of the classroom for their cue of how to deal with things that day. While none of those complicated issues in education can be pushed aside and overlooked, they are kind of joined on the stage with that responsibility and that privilege of being the one who can set the tone for how the students feel that day. So we try, in my program, to really work on happiness, joy, positive outlook, resilience, capacity to continue onward. And those things are deeply important, not just for the well-being of the teacher, but for their ability to lead those youngsters forward. So we work on that, and no matter what politician is in charge of what department and what office, national, state, local, those students are always going to be sitting there and watching. It’s a privilege to have the responsibility and the opportunity to stay joyful and hopeful, because the students need that.
What do you think is the biggest challenge teachers are facing today?
There are just such competing messages about the value of being a teacher. I tell them often in speeches that they wouldn’t have fallen into the profession of teaching; it’s not something you’re just default to anymore. You’re called to it. We just want to support them and keep them reminded of their “why.” The story I ended my talk with today about the girl in Decatur Township, the stories like that where we make an individual difference, that’s a big part of the why, and so we try to help them through the things that can keep redirecting their gaze in a negative way. It’s not toxic positivity at all, but the reminder that the good things and those reasons for them still exist is what we aim for.
What inspired you to be a teacher? Who was your “why”?
Oh, that’s a totally easy question. I had perfect vision when I was a little kid, and I started to lose it in the middle of elementary school. At that point, I was thrust into one-on-one relationships with the teachers, where they read me things or they helped explain things from third grade onward. My connection with individual educators grew much more personal, and there’s a whole string of them who I just fell in love with what they did and realized how much they were helping me. I wanted to be that person.
What do you hope your legacy is here at TSC?
The program I direct here is a tangible legacy. I hope part of my legacy is that kindness still matters, and that we are all better when we help each other. I hope those messages are legacies are on a level of disability. Seventy percent of people with visual impairments are unemployed. When I won Teacher of the Year, I knew at some point, some way, I wanted to move that needle just a little. I don’t know what opportunities to continue working in that area will be, but I hope to pour some more of myself in there.
I’m deeply fortunate to have been gainfully employed throughout my adulthood, and I know blind friends who are equally talented, who have not had those opportunities. So I’d like to think that my presence in a very sighted profession has been an encouragement to others with visual impairments and a measure of impact to my sighted colleagues, who are hopefully more open-minded to their students who have disabilities and to the potential of adults with disabilities.
What are your retirement plans? Do you have any you’re willing to share right now?
I’m not moving. I have a number of opportunities both professionally and personally, and at the beginning at least, I am going to just sit still for a little bit. I have been running, doing a lot of public speaking and work with my church, this job, and obviously many other things. So, for a little while, I’d like to see what it’s like to do laundry on a Tuesday instead of a Saturday. I’d like to do some traveling. I am a writer, and I’ve written a lot of newsletters, but I haven’t done a lot of personal writing, so there’s a potential for a book that’s calling my name.
Is there anything else that I didn’t ask that I should include here?
I am having an open house on Dec. 19 from 4 to 7 p.m. at Heartland Community Church, and my greatest wish is to reconnect with the people who’ve been part of my 32 and a half years of teaching. I would love to have my former students, families, colleagues, the community, and people who I may not even know share a particular memory with me.
It is a privilege to love my job so much that it is so bittersweet to step away. I know plenty of people who count down the minutes till they retire in other fields, and that is not how this semester has been for me. I am ready to retire and see what is next for me and change my pace, but I’m not vanishing or moving away, but I also know I won’t be in this role. While I don’t know who I am without being a TSC educator, I know that because I’ve been a TSC educator, it is good and right, and I’ll be more able to grasp that next “thing” because of it. This has turned out to be the greatest privilege of my life, and I am proud of TSC.
Jillian Ellison is a reporter for the Journal and Courier. She can be reached via email at jellison@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Lafayette Journal & Courier: An outgoing conversation with TSC’s Kathy Nimmer ahead of retirement