Editor’s note: To read profiles of all 2015-2016 Blackboard Awards honorees, click HERE!
Bill LaMonte
Grades 9-12, Biology, Chemistry, Advanced Biology, Advisory
Millennium High School
Tell us about some of the special joys and challenges you’ve experienced as a teacher.
Teaching is my passion! And I am grateful to live through this passion every day. It is a lesson I teach to all of my students: Find your passion and never let go! And when I see them finally find the things that drive them, watching them slowly latch on, ready to soar, it fills me with inexplicable joy. The true challenge is trying to facilitate this with every student that walks through my door. At times, it seems impossible, but I always welcome the challenge.
Please share a special project or achievement (or two) that you are particularly proud of from this year.
Whether it is my advisory, biology, or chemistry class, I always try to make things applicable to real life for my students. I find that the most applicable and empowering ways of educating others is through community service. I am proud to have encouraged many of my students to get involved in a variety of service-learning opportunities this year. My students deepened their compassion and understanding of students with disabilities by partnering with the iHope School in Harlem. Together, we created books and read to children with limited mobility. We also planned a prom for the older students, celebrating diversity regardless of disability. My students have also extended their knowledge of sustainable and eco-friendly farming by assembling a garden tower for the school. This tower will supply vegetables for our school’s salad bar, in an effort to promote healthy eating and reconnect our students back to nature.
Over the course of your career, what do you consider one or two of your greatest accomplishments?
As a former Peace Corps volunteer who taught in East Africa, helping to create global citizens has become an ambitious goal. However, through tons of help and support from administration, colleagues, parents, and even my own family and friends, I have taken students to five out of seven continents, exploring various cultures and languages, while focusing on community service in the process. I think the ability to “pay it forward” has been my biggest accomplishment, inspiring my students, colleagues, friends and family to want to see the world and aspire to make it a better place for their own children.
What drives you? What keeps you motivated and committed to being a dedicated and hard-working educator?
The challenge of helping others discover their passion empowers me. It never gets dull. Every year, with new students there are new challenges, which ignite me. Teaching is something I will be doing until the day I die.
Any special advice for parents on how they can best support their children academically at the grade level you teach? And more generally? And how they can have the most productive relationship with their children’s teacher and school?
Education really does start at home. It begins with those first words and questions that a parent hears. Such innocence. Such pure wonder. Unfortunately, the childlike curiosity quickly becomes extinguished and replaced with a need to please through good grades and high test scores. Spend a day with a five-year-old, and you will know the things he or she likes! But for some reason, when students enter my science class in high school, it is almost like they have forgotten what truly inspires them. Instead of looking at their education as a source of freedom and exploration, they find it cumbersome and boring. They prefer to zone out on video games, YouTube, and Facebook, rather than engage in discussions about worldly issues. When asked about their passions, I see blank stares. This concerns me. So I often tell parents to challenge their children to unplug and have deep conversations about what really drives them. More so, at parent-teacher conferences, ask the teacher if they know what inspires your child. The question may surprise them, and the answer may inspire you.
