Geoffrey Wingard doesn’t have all the answers to his students’ questions, but he learns alongside them. The Bangor High School history teacher believes that’s part of what makes him a good teacher.
“I hope my students see that I love learning with them,” Wingard said. “I don’t have all the answers all the time, but I’m part of the process of learning with them.”
Wingard, who has taught at Bangor High for 21 years and serves as head of the school’s history department, has been named Maine’s 2022 State History Teacher of the Year by the nonprofit Gilder Lehrman Institute, which promotes American history education.
This fall, the institute will name 10 finalists for the National History Teacher of the Year award from the state award recipients. The recipient of the national title receives a $10,000 prize and is honored at a ceremony in New York City.
Learning alongside students is more enjoyable when they push back and challenge him with questions and arguments of their own, Wingard said. That’s why he loves teaching high schoolers.
“Iron sharpens iron, so when someone has a great argument, it makes me have a better argument back,” he said.
The things that resonate most with Wingard are not the acceptance letters his students receive from Ivy League schools or high scores on their Advanced Placement exams. Instead, he values the interpersonal relationships he builds with students, especially those who start off not believing in themselves.
Early in Wingard’s career, he had a freshman student who wasn’t academically inclined. He wanted to stay after school one day to complete an additional project for geography class, but the student didn’t think his mother would believe his reason for staying after school, as he had previously only stayed after for detention.
So Wingard called the student’s mother, who was skeptical of Wingard’s claim to be her son’s geography teacher.
“She said, ‘If you’re really the geography teacher, what’s the capital of Brazil?’” Wingard said. “Fortunately, I knew and she let her son stay, and he did work he didn’t think he was capable of doing. It’s fun human interactions like that that make the job worthwhile.”
Wingard said he has built a reputation in his time at Bangor High as a “plug-in person” because he will teach any social studies class. But teaching ancient history remains his favorite.
“I love exploring the essential idea of what makes people human in the broadest sense — not what makes us biologically human but what makes us work together or have dysfunction,” Wingard said. “I think adolescents love those questions, too, because they’re developing, and the idea of how we’ve developed as a society and a species resonates with them.”
Regardless of the classes he’s teaching, Wingard said he aims to teach one freshman course and one senior course each year because he enjoys watching how students progress and grow into independent learners over those four years.
“As seniors, instead of just answering questions we ask of them, they come with their own questions, and we guide their research while they answer those questions for themselves,” Wingard said. “We’re not going to cram 5,000 facts into their heads and have that be meaningful in any way. What we want to do is give them the tools to be lifelong learners, and I think we do a pretty good job of that.”
In addition to being remembered as a lifelong learner, Wingard said he hopes students remember him as someone who was unbiased when presenting information.
“Social studies in particular can be a politicized field, and presenting data and historical evidence and providing the skills to analyze that evidence on their own can be tricky,” he said.
Despite his dedication to public education, Wingard didn’t initially plan to become a teacher.
After earning his undergraduate degree in anthropology from the University of Maine, he became a police officer in Rockland. His short tenure in law enforcement helped prepare him to be a teacher, he said, because it taught him how to communicate effectively and work with others.
Although he enjoyed the job, he missed academics.
“I found myself running radar at two or three in the morning while reading my old anthropology textbooks,” he said.
He returned to UMaine to earn his master’s degree in history while working as a part-time Old Town police officer. He then taught at UMaine for a year before accepting his current position.
Wingard said he was surprised to learn he had been named Maine’s History Teacher of the Year.
“I was really pleasantly surprised,” he said. “It came out of the blue, and it was kind of a shock.”