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Top Teacher: Kaneland English teacher inspires, educates for 35 years

In 1980, a 21-year-old Patty Welker nervously anticipated her first day as an English teacher at Kaneland High School.

Would the students like her? Could she run a good classroom that was both productive and joyful? Could she nurture a love of literature and writing?

“Some of those feelings remain. I just wanted to do the best job possible,” Welker said Tuesday.

That job has changed much. And so has her workplace all these years, the high school in Maple Park. While it is still surrounded by farm fields, as it has been since it was built in 1958, enrollment more than doubled during Welker's tenure due to population booms in Sugar Grove, Montgomery and Elburn.

Curriculum changed. Technology changed.

“I was super-excited when I got a typewriter in the classroom for personal use,” Welker recalled, laughing.

But whether using a typewriter or a computer to create lesson plans, Welker has focused on engaging all her students in writing and reading literature.

Reading fiction is important, she said, even as mandated standardized testing has started focusing on nonfiction. She applauds Kaneland officials for recognizing that.

“We want kids to see connections between various literary genres and forms. I've never felt any pressure here at Kaneland to abandon 'Hamlet' and teach manuals from IKEA.”

She strives to create a bridge from students to the characters and plots to get them to see “the problems everybody faces,” she said.

That includes, for example, having students write papers about the role of computer technology in society, including researching the National Security Agency while they are reading the novel “1984.” Students have been astonished to learn how their privacy may be invaded, she said.

Then there is the annual exploration of “Hamlet” in her Advanced Placement Literature and Composition class.

How does one get teens in the 21st century in the Midwest to relate to the 14th- or 15th-century travails of a Danish prince?

“Everybody goes through the same kind of questioning of themselves,” Welker said. Her students are at a stage in life where they doubt themselves and the people around them, as Hamlet does, she said.

The play is her favorite thing to teach because of its political issues and for challenge it presents to students.

“They struggle, and that's good,” Welker said, explaining that the advanced students need to be pushed sometimes. “I'll miss it. They (the students) love it,” Welker said. And every year, she thinks of new insights to share.

But she is retiring at the end of this month from the place she spent her entire career.

In the beginning

Welker grew up in the South suburb of Country Club Hills, one of five children of a father who was a sheet-metal worker and a mother who was a homemaker.

“I was not one of those kids who grew up knowing I wanted to be a teacher,” she said.

In the era of “women's lib,” her parents hoped she would blaze a trail in the business world. They were worried when she pursued a degree in English literature at Northern Illinois University, especially when she decided to teach. (A student-teaching gig at Kaneland cemented her choice: 'This is truly what I want to do,'” she thought.)

School enrollments were declining in the late 1970s as the last of the baby boomers aged out of school. Schools were closing. “It (teaching school) was not seen to be too terribly stable,” Welker said.

Still, her parents supported her decision. Which was good because she needed her father to drive her to her interview at Kaneland because she didn't own a car. Not wanting to hover, he waited for her in a tavern in nearby Maple Park, she recalled.

She started in an era when standards were looser than today and schools were designing much of their own curricula rather than buying it from publishers. Kaneland students could take electives such as “Sports in Popular Literature.”

“You could get through high school and not take a writing class,” Welker said.

She now teaches the senior English class and the AP course. Over the years she also taught freshman and sophomore classes, and creative writing. She spent 15 years as chairman of the English Department and designed much of the curriculum.

She gave up the chairman post a few years ago when she decided to retire.

“I knew I wanted to spend it (the remaining time) on my students,” not the behind-the-scenes organizational duties, she said.

Her students appreciate that.

“She never fails to make class fun and something that I look forward to. She's always more than willing to go the extra mile to help me with any paper that I have had to write, whether it be a college admissions essay or a piece for her class,” senior Julia Lennon said.

That included pitting the AP classes against each other in a contest to see who did the best on practice questions for the annual exam, Lennon said.

“It motivated us all to do good and (made) taking the tests something to look forward to.”

On Wednesday, students told her that preparation paid off. She asked them what they thought of the test, which they had taken in the morning, and was surprised when students told her the test's multiple-choice questions were easier than the ones they practiced.

All in the family

When Welker says the Kaneland staff is family to her, it literally is.

She met her husband, Norm, when he was first teaching at Kaneland. He left for a while to run a construction company, but returned to teach industrial technology. He is retiring this year, too.

They have a son, 29, and a daughter, 26.

And Welker is sharing some of her teaching duties this year, including the “Hamlet” portion, with her son-in-law, Dominic Bruno.

“I really have found a family. I found a husband and I found a husband for my daughter,” Welker joked.

On retirement

She won't miss some things, such as the increase in students that came several years ago — from 75 students to nearly 150 — when the school converted from a block schedule to an eight-period day. That conversion also cost her 75 hours of instructional time before the AP exam, she said.

And while she enjoyed reading students' papers, she won't miss having to grade them, she said.

She also recalled serving as a bowling coach, even though she knew nothing about bowling, because the athletic director asked her. “I sat and ate pretzels,” she said, and enlisted her husband's help.

And she won't miss “carrying students on my back” through “Beowulf,” even though likening it to a comic book with superheroes helped students understand it a bit more.

As for those first-day jitters?

“I learned very quickly the learning environment is not dependent on having a bunch of rules and regulations written on your board,” she said.

Instead, planning and execution, a love of students, and a strong desire to see they get the best education possible were key.

“The only thing that can keep me coming back every day is that room full of kids,” Welker said. “It's the kids. It's a cliché, but it is true.”

  Kaneland High School English teacher Patty Welker speaks to her Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition class Wednesday. Rick West/rwest@dailyherald.com
  Teacher Patty Welker helps senior Julia Lennon Wednesday in an Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition class at Kaneland High School. The students were working on finishing their portfolios for the year. Rick West/rwest@dailyherald.com
  Patty Welker works with a group of students in her Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition class Wednesday at Kaneland High School. Rick West/rwest@dailyherald.com
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