 by Deborah Fitts ’63 |
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RETIREMENTS ’01
Mary Minard
Mary Minard congratulates Catherine Harris ’84 on graduation day.
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"When history instructor Mary Minard ’55 decided to take early retirement this spring, a seismic quiver must have run through the very foundations of the school. The popular history teacher grew up at Phillips Academy, where her father, Kenneth Minard, also taught history for 40 years. Her mother, Dorothy Patten, had taught art history and English at Abbot. Now Mary herself has reached the four-decade mark since she began teaching in Andover in 1961. She worked first at Abbot, then moved to PA upon the merger of the two academies in 1973. "Mary Minard represents the best and finest traditions of both those old schools—a wonderful combination of rigor and compassion in the classroom," says Vic Henningsen III ’69, chair of the history department. The compassion grew naturally out of the Andover native's own still-remembered anxieties when she was tossed into the chilly waters of early-1950s Abbot. In that setting, youngsters were not given a lot of individual help, but were expected to fend for themselves. The administration was remote and the teachers aloof in their blazers, pleated gray skirts and saddle shoes. Their interactions with girls in the corridors and on the paths of Abbot Academy were strictly formal. After graduating from Smith College and teaching two years at the Walnut Hill School in Natick, Mass., Mary had a chance en-counter with Principal Mary Crane that led to an appointment teaching European and American history at Abbot. Before long, she was tapped to chair the department. Around the same time, the school began to relax some of its restrictive rules: "All right, you can wear loafers on Saturday, and lipstick if you absolutely have to," the girls were told. And when Don Gordon became principal in 1968 he brought new people and new ideas. That, together with the national unrest sparked by the Vietnam War and the women's and civil rights movements, shuffled off the old Abbot for good. "We just went straight out the window to the left," she recalls, "but we had the best time, offering teach-ins at the drop of a hat. We were paying a lot of attention to sensitivity training. We were way ahead of Andover about pedagogy." Thus when Andover merged with Abbot in 1973, the girls were feeling free and bold—and to Mary, who had been reared on the hill, the experience was a homecoming. "Mary is passionate about always thinking and rethinking her approach to teaching, which was the real strength of Abbot Academy," says Henningsen, who first knew her when she was teaching at Abbot and he was a student in her father's dorm. "She and others brought that passion up the hill to PA, which was then squarely anchored in the 1940s. She helped humanize the place." Today Andover is "a brand-new school," Mary agrees. "It's much more free, more open, more self-conscious. It's very intense and can be very stressful, but it's not debilitating. There's tons of support, and there are opportunities in art, music and community service that nobody dreamed of before," she observes. Despite her prolonged tenure at the school, Mary is respected by younger faculty for her innovative pedagogy. Two years ago, for example, she worked with a team of colleagues to develop a new approach to teaching ninth-grade history. Titled When Strangers Meet, the course she helped put together covers 1000-1500 A.D., tracking human migration and the interplay of cultures. Years earlier, she was also instrumental in creating the school's community service program. During an extraordinary 11-year effort of days, nights and weekends that she regards as her most rewarding period at Andover, she teamed up with the school's Catholic chaplain, Father Richard Gross, to create an array of opportunities for students to work with the disadvantaged. Although Gross left the school in 1992 and Mary has reduced her involvement in community service, most of the programs continue, and 800 students a year participate. "Performing service to the community frequently put these kids, who were so privileged, in a situation where they faced a challenge," she says. "For some it was just fun. For some it changed their lives." Mary also served in a dorm for many years, providing the support she missed in her student days at Abbot. Henningsen calls her "a terrific, committed house counselor," and says, "For her, the day did not end when classes were over." "I love teaching outside the classroom, where you're talking about things that are really fundamentally important. Names and dates—you can look them up," she comments. After her retirement, Mary will live in North Bridgton, Maine, in a landscape of lakes and mountains. She has no idea what she will do, but she says there will be new freedom. "At Andover, the nature of our work means we don't have much time to look beyond ourselves," she says. But truly, she seems to have done just that, for herself and four decades of students. Deborah Fitts ’63 is a free-lance writer living in Andover. Like Mary Minard, she was a faculty child who grew up on the Andover campus. |
Copyright, Phillips Academy, 2001
