by Camille Summers
Students often view their teachers as people who live and breathe their subjects…exclusively. OK. Maybe we see them as a mentor. Maybe as a coach. Maybe some of them tell us stories about their spouses or kids or what life was like back in the old days. But we don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the lives that teachers have outside of school. So I thought I’d do a little legwork and find out what some of our teachers like to do when they’re not here.
Mr. Houngblame
When Mr. Houngblame isn’t teaching French or keeping charge of the hallways, he gardens. It’s his second year gardening in Atlanta, but when he lived in Togo, he gardened each summer at his grandparents’ farm.
In Atlanta, he gardens both during the summer and during the school year. “In the summer, it takes me two hours a day because it’s not just about growing it,” he says. “You have to make sure it’s clean. I have to take the tomato cage off, tend, and then put it back on. There is a lot of groundwork. I’m planting some grass, and with grass, you have to water every day for two-three weeks before it’s green. It takes some time, but I enjoy it.”
He enjoys growing tomatoes more than any other plant. “I just like the way they look,” Mr. Houngblame says.
But he’s a fan of other vegetables too. “This year, I also planted a lot of habaneros.. It’s too expensive in the store, and they didn’t look real. Sometimes they say it’s organic, but it doesn’t look organic to me with my experience growing crops. I did some banana peppers and some okra too.”
Mr. Houngblame also told me about a vegetable he grew that was specific to his home country, Togo. “We have something called jute leaves. When I came here, I didn’t find any. There were some in California, but the leaves were too big! So I asked someone in Africa to send some, and they did, so now we grow them at home. If I’m not traveling in the summer, I tend to them a lot because they need a lot of water. Knowing my kids, if I’m not there, everything will turn rotten.”
With all of these vegetables, his wife cooks a delicious stew. The main ingredient is the jute leaves. “It’s a vegetable we use to make stew and soups in West Africa,” he says. “It’s very tasty. Usually, we make it with crabs, shrimp, goat meat, beef. We eat it with maseca, which is a ground corn that you can find at Walmart. We eat it every other day.”
But with all this gardening, sometimes he encounters some problems… like rabbits. “We didn’t close the back of the fence because we have neighbors on the other side,” he says. “They have a trampoline on their side and the kids always go play; we like the comradery. There’s a little bush on the back, and the rabbits always come to the garden and eat the strawberry plants and the jute leaves. The jute leaves are hard to find, so it’s hard to keep up with that rabbit. Next year, I want to see if I can have another fence around the jute leaves and strawberries, so that he doesn’t eat it.”
Gardening is Mr. Houngblame’s favorite activity. “I know it takes time, and it’s a lot of work. You have to move the ground with a machine, water, and remove the weeds, but at least I’m under the sun getting some Vitamin D.”
Mrs. May-Beaver
Outside of teaching multiple history and religion classes or helping out her two Lovett kids with school, Mrs. May-Beaver has found a passion for hot yoga.
She started on this hot yoga kick several years ago, but she recently moved to a 24/7 yoga studio called HotWorx.
She enjoys it because it distresses her life from all that AP World grading. “It relaxes me,” she says. “I put on my headphones, listen to a podcast or a book or maybe some music, and I sweat!”
But sometimes she doesn’t do it alone. Occasionally, her daughter will tag along and do some hot yoga too. Her daughters normally prefer the “hot cycling or hot rowing classes,” but she prefers the “slower classes,” she says.
One of her favorite aspects is that it doesn’t take too much time out of her day. “It’s only about a half-hour for a class.”
She started at HotWorx last spring, but now that it’s winter, she likes it even more. The heat of the hot yoga class takes away some of that cold, morning temperature.
“If it were up to me, the weather would be 95 degrees and humid.. It’s not up to me, so Hotworx is a good alternative!” she says.
Mr. Alig
I always see Mr. Alig in the mornings, waiting for students to come up from the deck, to greet them. I never think about what he does besides greet students in the morning and run the Lovett school (no small task).
Mr. Alig’s favorite hobby is reading (OK. So no big surprise or stretch on this one.).
“I am currently reading the biography of Winston Churchill called Churchill,” he says. “I just finished a Charles Dickens novel called Dombey and Son. I also have to keep up with the Lovett reading. I just taught Hamlet, and I’m about to teach Frankenstein as well.”
If you walk into his office, the first thing you notice are the bookshelves. He has two large bookshelves overflowing with books, and then his desk and his file cabinet have books piled on them as well. Like his own personal library. He even says that the books are a mixture of those he read and those he uses to teach. He’s read almost all of them, and there are probably about 200 books in his room.
Mr. Alig loves reading so much that he reads three times a day. “I read early in the morning. I get here really early. I just try and read for a little while. I try to read at the end of the day as well, and then right before I go to bed.”
Mr. Alig says his own personal favorite book is Great Expectations, but his favorite book to teach is anything Shakespeare related. “It took me a while as a high school student to get acclimated to Shakespeare. But now, there is something magical about teaching a Shakespeare play. It’s so rich and complex.”
Even though he didn’t love Shakespeare as a high schooler, the book that did have an impact on him was the Great Gatbsy. “I remember Great Gatbsy being a pretty powerful experience,” he says. “It was my junior year of high school. I just remember it was the first time that I saw this powerful piece of literature that you could look at from 80 different angles.”
And reading is a family affair for the Aligs. “My wife and son also read. We talk about what we read sometimes.”
He does have another, more physical, hobby that takes up a lot of his time: running. ”I get here (Lovett) at about 6:15 am,” he says. “I run at home. I wake up really early, and I go on a run every morning. I really need 90 minutes a day to maintain my sanity.”
