By Jonathan Newman
When I met up with new English teacher Amanda Hilliard, she was settling in under a cozy blue blanket in the frigid English department center to get some American Studies planning done. But we headed to room 219 for the interview so we wouldn’t disturb some other English teachers who were chatting about—believe it or not—books.
Ms. Hilliard will be teaching two sections of English 9 and two of AmStud. She said it’s been a “hot minute” since she’s taught American literature, which is her favorite. She’s particularly looking forward to the post-Modernism unit. “I’m a big Slaughterhouse-Five girl,” she said, citing Kurt Vonnegut’s novel about World War II.
Prior to coming to Lovett, Ms. Hilliard taught at the Fulton Science Academy in Alpharetta for three years. She described the school as very competitive. “All the students are in honors or AP,” she said. Before that, she taught in public schools in North Carolina.
She grew up in Edneyville, North Carolina, which is near Asheville and the Pisgah National Forest. While she said she is quite familiar with the area where students hike on JOE, she doesn’t think she’ll be leading a group in the spring. “I’ve already done my time at Pisgah National Forest,” she said. “I do not need to go back.”
So what was Ms. Hilliard like in high school? “I was definitely a nerd, and I’ll own that,” she said. There was a “short-lived experiment” with basketball because she’s so tall; however, much to her basketball coach’s disappointment, there were, as she put it, “no redeeming qualities in my athleticism.”
But she found where she “belonged” in her English classes. She was also editor-in-chief and photography editor of the yearbook. Later, as a teacher at Smoky Mountain High School in North Carolina and Fulton Science Academy, she served as advisor to the yearbook staff, which required her to set a higher bar for her students than she set for her own peers when she was the editor. For example, as an advisor, she made her students record everything and never ad-lib their quotes, but when she was a student, it was much more lax. “We were just trying to get it done,” she said.
Her dad taught science at her high school, which she said was really great. In fact, there was a “brief stint” when she thought she would be a science teacher. But when she got to Western Carolina University to start her undergraduate work, she decided to visit the English department to see what they were about, and she fell in love. “I just felt anew in that moment,” she said. ”I was like, I need to be an English teacher and study English.”
When she’s not sharing that love with students, she has two major hobbies, one that involves consuming calories and the other burning them.
She does a lot of baking in her spare time. She’s known for her cookies, especially peanut butter sandwich cookies based on her mom’s recipe. But for her “weirder” recipes, she likes to look at Instagram reels and TikToks. An example? A cake made with Earl Grey tea, peaches, and honey buttercream.
After we spoke, she was headed to the gym, which she hits it five days a week, three for weights and two for cardio. On cardio days, she might run a couple of miles on the treadmill or “just straight incline it the whole time,” while watching a show like Saint Dennis Medical or House of the Dragon. (She’s Team Black, BTW.)
One pet peeve about the gym: teenagers. While she loves teaching them in school, it does bug her a bit when, at the gym, they “just kind of loiter and chat, and then they’ll hog a machine for a while and do a couple of reps, and then they’ll take a selfie of the pump.” She’s fine with selfie taking, “but let’s speed it up a bit.”
Over the summer, she helped her best friend shop for a wedding dress, watching her try on over 20 dresses in less than 24 hours. She said she found it increasingly challenging to formulate an opinion about a slight variation on a white dress. On the opposite end of the summer activity spectrum, she sand surfed at Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado.
She also caught The Odyssey on film. Since she’ll be teaching ninth graders who will be reading the book, I was curious about her take. “Christopher Nolan is not a screenwriter,” she said, “and I need him to stop pretending to be one.” Nevertheless, she felt Nolan “humanized Odysseus in a way that’s more relatable in the modern world. He was more of a hero to root for.” She does hope her students have seen the movie, because she likes to talk about different interpretations.
Ms. Hilliard said she enjoyed reading Greek mythology as a kid, but The Odyssey was not one of her favorites. She was “more of a Narcissus and Echo person,” she said, and into other “tragic love stories.”
Looking forward, her biggest hope is to find her place where she fits in here at Lovett. From the limited amount of time I’ve worked with her, I think she’ll have no trouble doing so, and hopefully will stay here a long time.
Of course, if she was like the main character of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, a World War II soldier who is “unstuck in time,” I wondered which period of her life she’d be most happy to pop back into.
“I have learned recently about myself that I’m a deeply nostalgic person,” she said. “It’s the emotion I feel most often and most keenly. So I would love to go back to my childhood, when I was five or six, and the holidays with [my] parents and grandparents. I would love to relive those moments.”
As for the time she would least want to return to? “That’s such an easy answer because it’s middle school.”
