History Lesson

Two Decades and countless walks to school later…Kathy Hartley is one of New Roads’s most revered veterans.

Kathy Hartley has been at New Roads for 20 years. She has been a beloved teacher to thousands of students, and is one of the campus’s best-known faces. But how did she come to be an integral part of New Roads? 

“It’s gone from being a young school to an adult school. It was in its early stages and just feeling its way,” says Hartley about the culture of  New Roads when she first started. She saw New Roads as a place for open-mindedness and growth. “In a way, things were more open, freer, just because we weren’t as constrained by all the rules and regulations, and now we sort of are,” Hartley said. 

Hartley began her teaching journey as a substitute teacher at several different schools. However, one experience caused New Roads to stand out to her. Hartley says, on substituting for a New Roads English class, “One of the kids got up and just started walking back and forth when they were supposed to be working on an essay or something. They weren’t being disruptive and they weren’t being offensive, but they were walking and I was trying to decide whether to make her sit down or what to do, and one of the kids saw me trying to figure out the situation and they told me, ‘that’s okay, that’s just what she does’. And the fact that the kids were all just very comfortable and accepting of that was really impressive to me.”

Originally, Hartley never planned on being a history teacher. Hartley started out being interested in politics, and didn’t get into education until her junior year in college. She subsequently minored in education and did student teaching. “I taught for a year in cattle country, in Wisconsin, where everybody had a dairy farm. ‘Please excuse George for being late this morning but the cow got out of the pasture’, that was a note I got,” Hartley remembers of one of her early teaching experiences. After working in Wisconsin, she moved to the west coast to go to law school at Berkeley. She practiced law for 20 years, but “Teaching is a lot more fun, and more gratifying,” Hartley explained.. 

One thing many people already know about Hartley is that she walks to school every morning. “Actually, I take the bus part of the way now. I used to walk, but now I walk up to the bus and I take that. It’s cheaper, and my daughter crashed one of our cars so we were down to one car. And it’s healthy, it’s good exercise,” Hartley said.. And though she may be a teacher, she is also just like the rest of us. She plays the New York Times games, like Wordle and Connections, every day-  her longest Wordle streak?  64 days. 

Teaching American History, especially in this age, can be very controversial. Hartley teaches the course through supreme court cases, incorporating her love of politics and knowledge of the law into the material. “They are stories, and kids are engaged by it. Who were they, where were they from, and how did they get involved in the lawsuit? Everybody, including teenagers, finds that interesting,” she says. 

One of the main issues, Hartley says, is not having a lot of people who represent conservative viewpoints in the classroom. “That makes it hard, because there are valuable and worthwhile things to be said on the conservative side, and we don’t get that very often. That winds up making discussions kind of one-sided. And as things have gotten more and more divisive, the kids I deal with are pretty much on the same side,” Hartley said.

Hartley’s all-time favorite memory of New Roads, however, came from a series of presentations. “A kid’s topic was Neurodiverse People in Film and Movies. And the presentation was supposed to last around ten minutes. This presentation, we got to the end of the hour and they were still going. And I’m like, what do I do? Do I say ‘thank you that was great, and when we come back tomorrow we’ll go on to this person, etc. And I thought no, they prepared this thing and they have worked really hard on it and they’re really passionate about it, we’ll finish it. And I was worried the kids would be inattentive but we came back the next day, and they did another 20 minutes on this topic. And the kids were so polite, respectful, and receptive. And that was a great moment for all of us, they rose to the occasion and then some,” Hartley said.