A familiar face to many who have passed through Boynton Middle School, the former eighth-grade Social Studies teacher Mr. Harrington now plays the newly-minted role of Dean of Freshmen at IHS. In his first few months on the job, his amicable and forthcoming nature has already attracted attention even from those who didn’t know him previously. I decided to interview him to find out more about his fascinating job, prior teaching experiences, and life.
Daniel Xu ’17: Tell me a bit about your background: childhood, education.
Keith Harrington: I grew up in Ohio, just south of Cleveland, in a little town called Medina. I went to Garfield Elementary School, then a junior high school, then Medina High, and graduated from there. It was really a small town feel at the time: it wasn’t a suburb, it wasn’t a city; it was actually a little bit like Ithaca. Our high school was about the size of IHS, and we had two junior highs that were like Boynton and Dewitt, so it’s interesting that I ended up here. After high school, I went to college at Kent State University and majored in middle childhood education. I got a minor in science and social studies.
DX: Science, huh? I didn’t know you were into that.
KH: Yeah, actually, I always saw myself as a science teacher. That’s how I started out. I taught science for my first five years as a teacher and it was only after I moved to Ithaca that I started to teach history.
DX: What did you do before coming to IHS? It’s common knowledge that you were a Social Studies teacher at Boynton, but your career is more extensive than that.
KH: I’m actually really proud of my teaching career. I did my student teaching in a school called Callejo Americano in Quito, Ecuador. I traveled a little bit before that; my grandfather was an archeologist, so we went to the Yucatan and Baja in Mexico to explore some of the ancient sites. Those expeditions were specifically focused on the Maya. But it was mostly just exciting to go to Ecuador, learn Spanish, and just get a completely different experience.
So that was cool—I just stayed there and did my student teaching and some substituting, and traveled for a while. When I came back, the job market was a little weird and I was ready to leave Ohio. I enjoyed it, I liked it there, but I got into mountain biking and rock climbing and kinda wanted to be somewhere else. So I headed out to Las Vegas and taught at Cashman Middle School. Cashman is a pretty large school, inner-city, almost 100 percent free and reduced lunch. The year I got there, we were transitioning to wearing uniforms to try and eliminate some of the gang violence coming out of the community and into the school. And I loved it. I just had a blast. There were these huge classes of students that I wasn’t used to working with, coming from Northeastern Ohio, and I learned a lot. I learned a lot about myself, I learned a lot about the U.S. and how diverse it is, how different it is geographically. I think that was really formative for me and I worked early on to try to improve my teaching really quickly.
Another huge moment in my career was when I came to Ithaca and I switched from teaching science to teaching social studies. I had to completely reinvent my curriculum, rewrite all of my lesson plans, and acquaint myself with a completely different population of students. And that kind of pushed me back to see what’s at the root of teaching—what the most important things you maintain are no matter what you’re teaching. I could talk for a long time about that, so just cut me off there.
DX: Your current job title is Dean of Freshmen, but that by itself is a bit vague to those not in the know. What exactly do you do here at IHS?
KH: When I was still in Las Vegas, I had a stint as the Dean of Discipline there. That job taught me a lot about working with students and gave me the focus on positive behavior that I try to work with today. Because of that experience, I’ve come to realize that having a staff member who focuses on interacting with the younger students is incredibly important: it helps the freshmen make a smooth transition from middle to high school and gives them more choice in their new setting. I worked with Mr. Trumble at Boynton to help establish my current position. I’d say the original idea came from him.
DX: It’s only been two months since school started, but what are your impressions of the high school so far? Your job? How is working at IHS different from working at Boynton?
KH: Honestly, I’m very happy here. I’d always been a teacher before arriving at my current position, and that’s a completely different experience from what I do now. My personal view as a teacher I always felt was somewhat myopic: every day, I’d have the same routine, see the same people. Now I get a macro view of the high school, and I get to see what all of the teachers do rather than just sit my own classroom. I’m not yet sure how different the two schools are.
DX: What’s an average workday like for you?
KH: Despite my limited time on the job, I think I can safely say that there’s no such thing as an “average” workday for me. Every day is different: before, when I was a teacher, I rarely worried about events during the day, but now I have to keep track of schedules, meetings, all that stuff; often, there’ll be an unexpected incident with a student who’s in some sort of trouble and I get to talk to them about that. I guess on an average day, I would arrive at school around zero period, check my email quickly, then go to the cafeteria and try to chat with some of the students. When the bell rings, I’ll begin walking the halls and generally try to spread a positive attitude. I usually have a meeting in the morning and daily meetings with the counselors, as well as fourth-period lunch duty; I also meet with Mr. Trumble during the day to talk about my job and plans for the future. In between all of these things I’ll occasionally drop into classes and do three-minute walkthroughs, just observing each teacher’s style and seeing how the students are doing. In general, I get to learn a lot more about people doing these things and it’s been a great experience so far.
DX: What’s your philosophy when it comes to teaching?
KH: I truly believe that every single student has the ability to learn and improve themselves. To foster that potential, school should be a positive and safe place for everyone, so that every day, all of us can pay it forward. Personally, I always try to be as positive as possible and make that positivity infectious: when I walk through the halls, I’m always smiling; I’ll give some students high-fives. I’d say that my philosophy would be to ensure that everyone is always taking time to do their best.
DX: What are you looking forward to in your time here?
KH: In the switch from teaching to administration, one of the biggest things is that I’m no longer writing lesson plans and grading papers, which I used to do after school. My schedule was, get up in the morning, be in school by 7 or 8, get through the day, and in the evenings I’d go home to eat and get back to work on rewriting lesson plans, grading papers, and doing research. Now I don’t have all those things to do, so I’m really excited about having more time in my life to go to concerts, go to games, stuff like that. I’m looking forward to continuing to try to make more connections between the high school and the middle schools. The way I’m thinking about it in my mind is like a bridge, and I want to make that bridge as beautiful and inviting and safe as possible so that it’s really a smooth transition for kids to come out of middle school. I feel like a good long-term goal would be for students to come out of middle school and right into high school and feel like that was a really smooth, perfect transition; that it was time to make that.
Other than that, I think I changed some of the podcasts I listen to: I’m listening to a lot more podcasts that are focused on educational leadership and administration so I’m trying to learn as much as I can. I’m looking forward to working with PLCs and groups of teachers and trying to support them now, like I had so many teachers supporting me.