Tag Archives: Teacher Authors

Slam Poetry Artist and Educator Taylor McDowell-Mali

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Taylor-MaliThere are many talented educators who have earned accolades in fields other than education. This is true about Taylor McDowell Mali, a teacher who has also earned fame as a slam poet, humorist, and voice over artist.

Taylor was born on March 28, 1964. His father was H. Allen Mali, a manufacturer of pool table coverings, and his mother was Jane L. Mali, a recipient of an American Book Award. In 1983, Taylor graduated form the Collegiate School, a private boys’ school. After his high school graduation, he enrolled in Bowdoin College, earning his bachelor’s degree in English in 1987 and his master’s degree in English and creative writing from Kansas State University in 1993.

Taylor Mali spent nine years teaching English, history, and math, including stints at Browning School, a boys’ school on the Upper East Side of New York City, and Cape Cod Academy, a K-12 private school on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. He now lectures and conducts workshops for teachers and students all over the world. In 2001, Taylor Mali used a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts to develop the one-man show “Teacher! Teacher!” This show explores the combination of poetry, teaching, and math. He is a strong advocate for the teaching profession, and in 2000, he set out to create 1,000 new teachers through “poetry, persuasion, perseverance, or passion.” He finally achieved that goal on April 1, 2012.

Taylor has earned numerous accolades as a slam poetry artist. A slam poetry contest is a competition at which poets read or recite original work. These performances are then judged on a numeric scale by previously selected members of the audience. As a slam poetry performer, Taylor has been a member of seven National Poetry Slam teams, six of which appeared on the finals stage, and four of which won the competition.

Additionally, Taylor is the author of What Learning Leaves and the Last Time as We Are. He has recorded four CD’s. He is also included in various anthologies, and is perhaps best known for the poem “What Teachers Make.” The popular poem became the basis of a book of essays entitled What Teachers Make: In Praise of the Greatest Job in the World, published in 2012. He appeared in Taylor Mali & Friends Live at the Bowery Poetry Club and the documentaries “SlamNation” (1997) and “Slam Planet” (2006). He was also in the HBO production Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry, which won a coveted Peabody Award in 2003.

Elmer C. “Mike” Alft: High School History Teacher, Published Historian, and Elgin Town Mayor

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ecThere are many examples of talented teachers who win acclaim in professions other than teaching. This is the case with Elmer C. “Mike” Alft, a retired high school history teacher who is also recognized as an American historian and the former mayor of Elgin, Illinois. He is pictured here, on the right, with a relative.

Mike was born in 1925 in Chicago, Illinois. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Grinnell College in 1949. Founded in 1846, Grinnell College is a private, co-ed, residential liberal arts and sciences college located in Grinnell, Iowa. In 1950, Mike earned a master’s degree from Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York.

Mike’s long career as a teacher at Elgin High School spanned four decades. While teaching, he also served as a city councilman, mayor, and secretary of the Board of Trustees of the Gail Borden Public Library District. Mike was first elected to the Elgin City Council in April, 1963. Four years later he was elected the mayor of Elgin. As was the custom at the time, the distinguished educator did not seek re-election when his four-year term expired in 1971. The dedicated educator also taught part-time at Elgin Community College.

Mike is probably best-known as the historian of his home town of Elgin. He has published numerous books on the history of Elgin and the surrounding area, in addition to hundreds of articles for the local newspaper, the Elgin Daily Courier-News. He currently writes a bi-weekly column on Elgin’s history.

Loren Spears: Native American Teacher and Cultural Educator

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2437_71373757792_8359_a[1]Many talented and dedicated educators work diligently to foster an appreciation for the cultures of under-represented ethnic groups. One such educator is Loren Spears, a teacher, essayist, artist, and tribal council woman of the Narragansett Tribe in Rhode Island.

As a youngster, Loren attended Chariho Regional High School in her home town of Charleston, a rural village in southern Rhode Island. After her high school graduation, she earned her bachelor’s degree in elementary education and teaching at the University of Rhode Island, graduating in 1988. She earned her master’s degree in education at the University of New England in 2002.

Loren’s teaching career spanned two decades and included twelve years as a first grade and fourth grade teacher in the Newport Public School system working with at-risk children. Throughout her professional career, Loren has always been a strong advocate for integrating more Native American history and experiential learning into school curriculum. Loren says she remembers, “being in a history class during my elementary days and actually reading that I supposedly didn’t exist, that my family didn’t exist, that my people didn’t exist.” She has spent much of her adult life correcting that misimpression.

In addition to her professional accomplishments as a teacher, Loren works as the executive director and curator of the Tomaquag Indian Memorial Museum in Exeter, Rhode Island. The museum was the site of a private, state-certified school, the Nuweetooun School, which this talented educator directed from 2003 to 2010. Nuweetooun, which translates as “Our Home” in the Narragansett language, was founded by Loren with the help of the Narragansett community and generous donations, including monies from a local charity, the Narragansett Tribe, and the Rhode Island Foundation. Though Loren is Narragansett, the school is not connected to any specific tribe. As the school’s director, Loren made sure that the Nuweetooun School provided Native American children from kindergarten through the eighth grade an experiential, collaborative curriculum based on Native American traditions and culture, as well as standard academic subjects including mathematics, language arts, social studies, science, and health.

In June, 2005, Loren received the Feinstein Salute to Teachers, Teacher of the Month. In 2006, she earned the Native Heritage Gathering Award, and in 2010, Loren was chosen as one of eleven Extraordinary Women honorees for Rhode Island in the area of education. Today, this chalkboard champion lives in Providence, Rhode Island, and uses her vast energy to focus on educating the public on indigenous issues, arts, culture, and history through cultural arts programming, lectures, art classes, inter-generational programming, grant writing, exhibit development and design, curriculum development, school design, Native American education, and educational consulting.

Kindergarten Teacher Sara Ware Bassett Was Also a Prolific Writer of Novels for Young Adults

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SWBassett[1][1]Talented teachers often earn acclaim in fields other than education. One such chalkboard champion was Sara Ware Bassett, a kindergarten teacher who worked in the public schools of Newton, Massachusetts. Her career as a teacher spanned twenty years, but during these years, she was also a prolific author of books for young adults.

Sarah was born in 1872 and educated in Newton. Her family spent their summer vacations on Cape Cod. After her high school graduation, she attended the Lowell Institute of Design at MIT where she majored in textile design. She then studied writing at Radcliffe and Boston University. In her later years, she divided her time between homes in Princeton and Cape Cod.

She began her career as an author writing a series of non-fiction books for young adults. The series was entitled The Story of Lumber, The Story of Wool, etc., but it was through fiction that her talent was really evident.  Many of her novels focus on love stories and humorously eccentric characters. She wrote over forty novels for young people, most with Cape Cod as the setting. Some of these titles were Within the Harbor, Hidden Shoals, and Flood Tides. The novels usually took place in the town of Belleport, a locale which she created that seemed so real to her hundreds of readers that they could not believe it did not really exist. Many readers made pilgrimages up and down the Cape looking for it! Two of her novels were even made into movies. Her very first novel, The Taming of Zenah Henry, became the movie Captain Hurricane when it was released by RKO. The Harbor Road filmed by Universal became Danger Ahead.

During her lifetime, Sarah cut an unusual figure around town, resembling a character in an English detective novel. She dressed as one would expect Agatha Christie’s character Miss Marple would have dressed, sporting tweed skirts, a man’s shirt, and sensible walking shoes. She was often seen around Princeton as she conducted her daily errands at the post office or the general store.

When she passed away in 1968 at the age of 95, she left a legacy of over 500 books of her own writings and those of her contemporaries to the Boston Public Library. The collection is now part of their Rare Books and Manuscripts Collection.