By Cheryl Cranick, Honors Program
Amy Nocton, B.A. ’92 (CLAS-Honors), M.A. ’93 (CLAS) became a teacher by chance. Once in the classroom, her love for the Spanish language inspired her students to love it as well. A small group of those students even followed her footsteps, becoming UConn Honors Scholars and educators, too.
Amy began taking languages classes in high school. Her father initially pushed her to Latin, but her teacher frightened her, she said. Amy wanted to study French, but her father convinced her to study Spanish, with the promise of a trip to Spain after two years. Amy’s competitive nature accepted the challenge, and at age 17 she went to Valencia for five weeks. Amy was completely immersed in the language there, and when she returned to the U.S., her skills had advanced one year’s worth of high school curriculum, said Nocton.
Spanish became her pursuit at UConn, woven in between history and literature courses in Latin American Studies. “Everything clicked,” she said. “It’s awesome when that happens.” She completed an Honors degree in Latin American Studies-Spanish, and also began taking coursework for her master’s degree in International Studies. At graduation she earned the Outstanding Academic Achievement Award for the Humanities and distinction as a University Scholar.
After college, Amy was awarded a Fulbright and went to Chile to prepare. However, shortly she learned the funding was pulled due to the economy, and she found herself without a job or any clear direction in life. She returned to the U.S. and applied for a childcare position she found in her local paper. The family initially intended to hire Amy as a home helper, but Amy’s Spanish skills filled a different need. The family’s father worked at the private Westminster School in Simsbury, Conn., and the school was looking for a new Spanish teacher. “I interviewed and was hired that day,” said Nocton. “I had never wanted to teach, but I ended up loving it.”
Amy spent three years in private school before transitioning to public school, and for the past 16 years she has taught at RHAM High School. Nearly a decade of her time there overlapped with her husband, Jason Courtmanche, B.A. ’91 (CLAS-Honors), Ph.D. ’06 (CLAS), who taught high school English. Their years at RHAM introduced the couple to many students, but some have specifically stayed with them: Hannah Mondrach, B.A.’12 (CLAS-Honors), B.A.’13 (CLAS-Honors), M.A.’14 (EDUC); Dana Lovallo, B.A./M.A. ’13 (EDUC-Honors); and Seana Marceau ’11 (CLAS).
Hannah graduated from RHAM in 2008 after having had both Amy and Jason as teachers. She credits the couple for her decision to choose the UConn Honors Program. “When I think of Amy and Jason and their approach to teaching and life, I think of grace and grit,” said Mondrach. “They put all they have into everything they do, but make it look so effortless.”
Dana was also encouraged by Amy and Jason to attend UConn Honors, and she felt prepared for the experience. “Amy’s Spanish ECE class gave me a huge glimpse of what a college-level course would be,” said Lovallo. “She challenged us to read literature that I actually encountered again at UConn,” she said. Lovallo was a 2008 graduate of RHAM and former student of both Amy and Jason as well.
Amy taught Hannah and Dana in their Early College Experience (ECE) Spanish courses, which are high school classes designed to introduce students to the rigor of college. “The high school students are truly getting a sense of what college-level classes are expecting,” said Nocton. ECE classes are different from the more well-known Advanced Placement (AP) courses high school students can also take for college credit. However, Amy noted that ECE credits are becoming more accepted by universities than AP credits. “AP is a snapshot,” said Nocton, “it’s just one day, it’s a test. [ECE] are courses that are credited, they are vetted by university personnel,” she said.
Hannah believes teachers such as Amy and Jason have unique abilities in the classroom. “They make you feel like, at the end of it, you did all of that hard work yourself, even though in the background they were working harder than anyone to help you succeed,” she said.
Becoming teachers
In many ways, the young women were becoming teachers through their close association with Amy and Jason. “My friends would joke that I was going to become ‘the next Señora Nocton,’” said Mondrach. Amy is inclined to agree. “Hannah is an extraordinarily talented linguist” said Nocton. “She studied Italian with me as well. She has a little box for Spanish and a little box for Italian, and never shall they meet.” Hannah studied Spanish and Italian literature as a UConn Honors student, but stayed an additional year to major in geosciences as well. Hannah is finishing up her education master’s degree this year at UConn with the intention of teaching STEM.
Amy inspired Dana as well, not just in her career, but also in her Honors thesis. Dana, who was hired in 2013 as an E.O. Smith High School Spanish teacher, completed a two-pronged Honors thesis project. She encouraged immersion programs for current college students by developing a marketing booklet for the Office of Study Abroad to promote the program she pursued: UConn in Granada. Dana also wrote a paper in Spanish that examined her survey research about the importance of immersion experiences for Spanish teachers, noting how Amy’s many overseas excursions enhanced her ability to teach, she said.
Hannah and Dana knew early on that education was their future, but another one of Amy and Jason’s students did not. Seana had Amy for ECE Spanish at RHAM, but she never formally took a class with Jason. He met her while on sabbatical to write his dissertation, when Seana began assisting the family after school as a mother’s helper. Once Jason returned to RHAM, “Seana had a habit of crashing my classes anytime she had a free period, and she became more like a co-teacher,” said Courtmanche.
Seana’s presence in his classroom was specifically important during his lower-level courses, classes where students were less interested in literature. “Seana would come in, and when we read…she’d take a part, I’d take a part, the students would take a part, and she and I would put effort into acting out the scenes, which provided a good example and motivation for the other students,” said Courtmanche.
Despite her obvious skill in the classroom, “[Seana] used to swear up and down she was not going to go into education,” said Courtmanche. “But she hung out with Amy and me—and all our friends are teachers… It got into her skin somehow, whether she wanted it to or not.”
At the start of her senior year at UConn, Seana was still adamant she was not going to teach, though she was majoring in Spanish and English. It was a year that almost didn’t happen. Personal issues nearly forced Seana to leave school, so Amy and Jason persuaded her to move in with them, and she would help around the house with chores and child care. But soon after she moved in to help take care of the family, Seana was struck head-on by a drunk driver. She was taken by LifeStar and survived, though she required a new kind of support from Amy and Jason, who assumed the caregiver role for her. “She didn’t even take an incomplete though,” said Courtmanche. “She finished the semester, made the dean’s list, and then in the spring semester finished up her senior year with me driving her around,” he said.
After graduating from UConn, Seana accepted a teaching job in southern Spain. She floated between various classrooms during her time there, teaching subjects as the need arose, such as physics and chemistry. “She was self-teaching herself to be able to teach the kids,” said Nocton. “Whatever they needed her to do.” Seana’s principal nominated her for a teaching award, which she won. The award led to a fellowship at Columbia’s Teachers College. Jason remembers Seana saying: “You always said I’d be good at teaching; you said the kids would love me, but you never said how much I would love them.”
These teachers’ lives, a generation apart, are linked by even the small details. In 2011, Amy—the woman who never intended to become a teacher—won the Teacher of the Year award from the ECE program. That was the same year Seana won the Spanish Distinguished Scholar Award from UConn. Dana received the same award the following year. Hannah graduated from UConn not just an Honors Scholar but also a University Scholar, as Amy did. And all four women found their love for teaching in a Spanish classroom.
Return to the Spring 2014 issue of the Honors Alumni eNewsletter