Featured photo: The 1982 faculty and staff production of “Fiorello!”

This article was originally published in the Winter 2024 issue of the GFS Bulletin.

Welcome to Part 2 of of "The Past is Present," mini profiles of GFS teachers who've made a lasting impact on the history of the school and the lives of countless students. Check out Part 1 of this article here.

SUSANNA S. KITE
When GFS re-opened in 1864 after two false starts, they hired one teacher: Kite, then 22 years old. Salary: $400. Subjects: reading, writing, arithmetic, spelling, history, and geography. Students: six. The reborn school was a success, enrollment spiked, and Kite was named principal, a position she held until she was replaced by her brother-in-law in 1869 (to prevent an exodus of boys, she was told). The beloved “Teacher Sue” returned to the classroom, where she remained for the next 35 years, cementing her reputation as “kind” and “just.

WILLIAM F. KOONS
Students who had Bill Koons as their history teacher during his 34-year tenure at GFS, which began in 1973, will never forget the constant presence of his pipe. Tamp, tamp, tamp. Pause. Light. Pause. Smoke. Pause. Repeat. They’ll also remember the irrepressible Koons’ theatrical storytelling, his acerbic humor, his insistence that students dig deeply into primary sources and reach their own conclusions, and his passion for the subject—all of which combined to inspire scores of graduates to choose history as their college major. “You have to love what you do,” Koons told the GFS Bulletin in 1990, “you have to love what you teach.”

FLORENCE BATTIS MINI
“Fearless, stubborn, a dedicated teacher.” These were a few of the words Anna Battis Kogan ’00, Florence Battis Mini’s daughter, used to describe her mother on the occasion of her retirement. From 1983 through 2009, Battis Mini ran a tight ship in her Latin, Classics, and history classrooms, and was known for being tough but fair (​​she calculated grades to the closest tenth of a point). Though she was not one to tolerate “inappropriate” behavior among her students, she was always a good sport whenever she was satirized in Classics Day skits. Her enthusiasm for language was contagious, and she brought Latin to life through spirited debates, philosophical discussions, and the use of “the bird book.”

GENEVIEVE M. NELSON
When Gen Nelson came to GFS in 1989, biology, chemistry, and physics were taught in four retrofitted, 600-square-foot classrooms in Sharpless. When she retired as Science Department head after 34 years of striving to “bring science at GFS into the 21st century,” Nelson had re-sequenced and integrated the curriculum to align with the latest pedagogy; introduced new subjects and activities, from bioethics to DNA separation and analysis; and spearheaded the push to build a glorious new home for science, the 16,400-square-foot Wade Science Center. Among the many positive outcomes: more students signing up for advanced science classes, including more girls, an historically underrepresented group in the sciences.

IRVIN C. POLEY, Class of 1908
Poley was a giant—“a great teacher and a great teacher of teachers,” wrote Bill Koons. The scale of his influence on his students, profession, and alma mater is immeasurable. At a school that had forbidden or resisted the arts, Poley—an English teacher starting in 1913 and, eventually, acting head of school before his retirement in 1958—steered GFS toward a full embrace of the arts, now one of the school’s defining strengths. His literature collection is displayed in the Main Building, where the auditorium bears his name, and the Friends Free Library holds the entirety of his personal scrapbook collection chronicling theatre in the early-to-mid 20th century. Perhaps the most fitting tribute to the father of the Theatre Program is the Poley Festival, the school’s annual celebration of student theatre, film, comedy, and dance.

DAN SHECHTMAN
Shechtman was a physical education, history, and sex education teacher; a coach; the creator and head of the school’s Adventure Education program; an avid reader of The Journal of the Society for Primitive Technology; and a seeker of educational experiences in the great outdoors across North America. For 36 years starting in 1972, he transmitted that knowledge and enthusiasm to his students. Shechtman taught them to climb, make a fire, build a log cabin, and portage a canoe (his students did the latter 17 times on one field trip in northern Ontario). “If you treat children like they can do things,” he said, “they will do things.”

- by Hillel J. Hoffmann & Emily Kovach