After retiring last spring, John Burghardt has returned to teach English 12 for the remainder of the 2024-25 school year. He teaches a section of English 12, one of the classes taught by English teacher Aisha Sidibe before her abrupt departure from GDS last month.
Upon his departure from GDS last spring, Burghardt expressed interest to English Department Chair Katherine Dunbar in returning to GDS as a substitute teacher in the future.
In November, Sidibe resigned suddenly, leaving her English 10 and 12 classes without a teacher. “There was a scramble to get the classes covered with some sort of smooth transition with people who were here, who would not be starting from zero,” Burghardt said.
English teacher Julia Fisher now teaches one of Sidibe’s English 12 classes, and former substitute teacher Catherine Humphries teaches Sidibe’s English 10 classes. The administration was also looking for someone to teach her other English 12 section left without a teacher.
Burghardt said the administration wanted someone to teach the class who had already developed a connection with teachers and students. He taught English 12 last year, which he said made him a good candidate to take over for Sidibe.
When English teacher Julia Fisher chaperoned for an overnight field trip in early November, she told Dunbar about her need for a substitute teacher, and Dunbar thought Burghardt would be the ideal person to teach the class because he was especially passionate about the texts by William Shakespeare and John Milton that Fisher was teaching. “That brought me back into the building, and it was delightful,” Burghardt said.
(Fisher is the faculty advisor for the Bit.)
Burghardt said returning to GDS as a long-term replacement for Sidibe was a difficult decision for him since he had enjoyed his retirement for the past five months, but he ended up agreeing. “I could see that it was such a reasonable and appropriate solution to the problem, and so in the habit of saying yes before I quite meant it kicked in,” Burghardt said.
He said that this year was the first time since starting kindergarten he had enjoyed fall without being in a school environment. “It was amazing. I was dazzled by the light effects and the weather,” he said. “The things that I was anxious about just didn’t arise.”
He did miss aspects of teaching, though. He said he particularly enjoyed reading students’ papers and leaving comments. He said grading “really felt like having a conversation with the students, getting in their head, and that was interesting. I’m proud of the way it facilitated rewriting, and I felt it was both really engaging and got me inside the kids’ heads.”
Before leaving, Sidibe had already taught her choice texts—texts chosen by the teacher that vary between sections of the same course—for the year, such as Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.
“It worked out beautifully,” Dunbar said. “There was nothing on the list that the kids were expecting to get from Sidibe but they’re not getting, and they’re actually getting one bonus text.”
In the English 12 class, Burghardt will teach Hamlet by William Shakespeare and Beloved by Toni Morrison, and a text of his choosing, which is the play Death and the King’s Horseman by Wole Soyinka.
Burghardt said that he especially likes preparing for each class at GDS, and he enjoys that the discussions in his classes go beyond what he planned. “The text and what I thought I was going to say moves into this matrix of 16 kids, and it’s just surprising,” Burghardt said.
Senior Sowmya Natarajan said that though she enjoys classes with both teachers, Sidibe and Burghardt have very different teaching styles and that the class environment changed when Burghardt began teaching. “It changed to John Burghardt style, which is more of reviewing the book and going over what we read, which we didn’t really do in Sidibe’s class,” Natarajan said.
Dunbar said it is “fantastic” to have Burghardt back at GDS. “He brings his whole personhood to his teaching and to the room, so to have him around us is inspiring,” she said.