John Burghardt walked his students out to the long, narrow outdoor pathway between the first-floor classroom windows and a wooden fence. There, he challenged his students to string a wooden bow. It was 1996, and he was teaching his students The Odyssey, one of the English 9 core curriculum texts.
Like the suitors in The Odyssey, none of his students could do it. But then, Burghardt did it effortlessly. “I remember all the teachers who had classes at that time being quite surprised when they saw an arrow flying past their windows,” Ben Nussdorf ’00 said.
Burghardt joined the GDS faculty in 1975 and retired in 2024 — a near half-century at the school. At the 2024 graduation ceremony, Burghardt received an honorary high school diploma. “No retiring teacher receives a diploma from GDS except if they’ve taught masterfully and selflessly for 49 years in our school,” Head of School Russell Shaw said.
As the members of the class of 2028 enroll in English 9, it is altogether fitting they, along with the rest of us, learn of Burghardt’s expertise that graced the GDS campus for 49 years.
During his time at GDS, he was not only a high school English teacher, but also a middle school teacher, high school advisor and faculty advisor of many clubs, including literary magazine Grasslands. High school English teacher Michael Manson said that, during Burghardt’s retirement party, high school English teacher Julia Fisher, who graduated GDS in 2009, showed Burghardt her notes from when she took his class in the 2006-07 school year. “He could remember everything about that class period,” Manson said. (Fisher is the Bit’s faculty advisor.)
Burghardt attended the University of Michigan for graduate school. As a graduate student, he taught freshman English classes by day and worked on his dissertation on Samuel Johnson’s literary criticism by night.
Then, Burghardt decided he no longer wanted to pursue his career as a professor. “College teaching seemed relatively unstable and sterile,” he said. That decision led him to the Flint Hill School in Oakton, Virginia for a short period in 1974. Flint Hill opened in 1954, the year Brown v. Board of Education was decided. “It was one of those private schools that was an alternative to integrated education,” Burghardt said.
Burghardt applied to teach at GDS in 1975, when he was in his late twenties.
Burghardt joined the GDS faculty as a middle school teacher in 1976. “I just felt it was heaven; it seemed like paradise,” he said. “I was amazed that this place could actually exist with so little correction — so little emphasis on instruction, on correction, on walking in lines, on presenting clean fingernails.”
Cynthia Henebry ’91 said that, in the eighties, students were not as open as they are now to talking about issues of race, gender, sexuality and mental health. But in Burghardt’s class at that time, students openly shared poetry about those topics. “He cultivated an environment that allowed people to share what they could of themselves and their challenges,” Henebry said.
In Burghardt’s creative writing class, students read each other’s work and analyzed it to practice their close reading and writing skills. Lane Blumenfeld ’85 was cleaning his house recently when he found a poem he wrote as a sophomore in Burghardt’s creative writing class. In the poem, he used rock climbing as a metaphor for sexuality. He remembers reading it aloud to his classmates—one of whom was his step-sister.
“I’m thinking back on that,” Blumenfeld said. “That could have been totally humiliating. How did I even come up with this, let alone agree to be okay reading it aloud?” But, as if he were analyzing any other piece of literature, Burghardt critiqued the poem and identified the metaphor’s fault — it was too obvious — and suggested that Blumenfeld reconsider the image.
Okori Puryear ’01 said Burghardt always enriched conversations with an extra level of enthusiasm. “He would always bring this full view to the conversations we were having,” Puryear said.
Burghardt also used unorthodox teaching methods to help his students learn, according to Blumenfeld. He brought them to local Civil War battlefields like Antietam to reinforce the lessons he taught to his U.S. history class with visuals of the battles they studied in class. He sang songs with them and played music on a record player in the background of his lessons. He also taught his students Old English so they could understand the original text of Beowulf.
Burghardt said the students he taught were studious but also had a playful spirit. “The kids expected good teaching,” he said. “They gave you instant feedback. They were as sensitive as a barometer on the wall to when you were making it, when you were not, and when it was meeting those marks.”
Burghardt said he felt he could explore texts without feeling the need to repeat prior scholars’ analyses. “There were these various schools that you had to honor when you’re teaching,” he said of college education. “With high school kids, it’s just the story and what you can get out of it.”
Students also loved when they could lead Burghardt away from discussing the texts and lead him into a story about, for example, the patients at the psychiatric hospital where his wife worked. “If you could get him off of English or off of history and onto a John story, that was the success,” Blumenfeld said.
Rachel Schneider ’24 recalled a ghost story unit during Burghardt’s English 10 class. After the students shared their ghost stories, “he was like, ‘guys, these are not good ghost stories,’” Schneider said. So he told his own ghost story. “We were all shocked. No one could follow that,” Schneider said.
Harvard professor Stephanie Burt ’89 was a student of Burghardt in the late 1980s. In a YouTube video about her favorite teachers, she mentioned Burghardt as one of two — the other being top poetry scholar Helen Vendler. Burt said Burghardt was dedicated “to making the classroom an active and democratic and participatory space, where everyone knew that we had something to learn.”
As a professor, Burt said, she incorporates many teaching techniques Burghardt used. She especially admired that he values students’ work as much as he values the great writers and points out students’ moments of literary genius.“He was always making the classroom a space of active reading and listening,” she said in the video.
Outside the classroom, Burghardt advised many GDS clubs, including the Freestyle Club—a club centered around freestyle rapping — in the early 2010s. At club meetings, members sat in a circle and took turns freestyle rapping over a beat. Everyone had to participate. “It was really cool seeing John approach freestyle rapping because his history or his background wasn’t in hip hop,” Andro Zuzul ‘12 said.
Burghardt also worked as faculty advisor for GDS’ literary magazine, Grasslands. When asked about Burghardt’s legacy, high school English teacher Mike Wenthe mentioned the freshly baked cookies Burghardt always brought to meetings for Grasslands. “I don’t know if the cookies will be part of his legacy or not. Perhaps they deserve to be,” Wenthe said.
People who spent time with Burghardt noticed his motivation in all areas of life, not just in his teaching.
“There’s something that’s in him that really drove him,” Blumenfeld said. “He biked to school every day, including in rain and snow. Like, who does that?”
“Last year when I was down in the weight room during an all too short-lived period of getting exercise,” Wenthe said, “I would occasionally see John pop in at the end of the day, and he would drop and do like 50 push-ups and then go home. For all his devoted attention to the life of the mind, he also takes care of himself.”
“I will always remember when he broke his leg on this crazy rock climbing accident,” Puryear said. Burghardt had a full-leg cast, but he showed up to class one day without the cast on, claiming it was too restrictive — he had taken it off himself.