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Beechcroft Teacher

Beechcroft teacher instills learning, with love

Antonia Mulvihill is receiving an honorary doctorate for her work instructing, inspiring and caring for students

Instructor Antonia Mulvihill laughs while addressing her English class at Beechcroft High School in Columbus.

FROM: The Columbus Dispatch; October 10, 2012

The Columbus Dispatch Monday April 9, 2012 10:47 AM

Always a good reader, she was recruited to help teach fellow third-graders to read, too. Her classroom was a janitor’s closet in her small North Carolina school.

Antonia Mulvihill understands now that it was in that closet that she became a teacher.

She didn’t take a direct path to a regular classroom. There first was a bachelor’s degree in French literature from Dartmouth and two master’s degrees from Yale, work with refugees, volunteering as a teacher, having her own children.

But now she is teaching English at Beechcroft High School in Columbus. She is too humble to admit that she has become the kind of teacher whom every kid wishes he had, the kind who makes you fall in love with learning.

No matter. Kenyon College is saying it on her behalf: Mulvihill will be given an honorary doctorate in humane letters on Tuesday for her work as a teacher, an intellectual and a human.

Ask her why, and she’ll shrug and say, “I just love kids” or “I love teaching” or “I love to see my students succeed.”

Ask others, and you’ll hear her called “a gift,” someone who uses the power of literature to — quite literally — change the course of children’s lives.

“She works with kids who have to struggle against every possible economic and social barrier and does things well beyond the call of duty,” said Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky, an English professor at Kenyon, in Gambier in Knox County.

Lots of teachers who work in urban schools make a difference. It might be that the stories everyone tells about Mulvihill — her picking up students stranded with a flat tire, taking in homeless ones, keeping a bucket with fixings for sandwiches in her car for hungry kids she might encounter — are more common than we know among teachers.

Still, there’s no denying that there’s something special about Mulvihill.

She raised two sets of children — her own two, by birth, and five Vietnamese refugee children who lost their mother. While they continued to live with their father, she stepped in to help. Nights of cooking two meals, doing two sets of homework and clarinet lessons and running a minivan nearly into the ground were a given to her. Those children are in college now, pursuing degrees in fields such as pharmacy and medicine.

She and her husband, Fred Long, a doctor at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, also have taken in a Somali child and children from other countries.

And then there’s Mulvihill, the teacher. In her classroom at Beechcroft, where she has been for eight years, is a folding table stacked with at least 100 books she has bought for students. She desperately wants them to value literature the way she does. So she buys thousands of books for them to take home, read, love.

“You can always find some kid for every book,” she said.

Sometimes her students bemoan all the essays she assigns but soon realize they’ve become articulate writers. They appreciate the way she makes them think and relate, even to Shakespearean plays. Students in the class she teaches through the Kenyon Academic Partnership — a college-level course taken through their high-school teacher for college credit — are reading Siddhartha , a novel about the spiritual journey of an Indian man at the time of the Buddha. They even seem to like it, engaging in analysis and discussion.

“For kids, teaching them to read, write, think and express themselves is the best thing you can teach,” Mulvihill said.

Her students say they realize they’re learning more than English or grammar.

“She cares about you more than any other teacher cares about you. Knowing someone cares about you so much is motivation,” said Arthur Thomas, who is 18 and a student of hers.

Mulvihill said she believes, deep down, that every student should have a chance to be great, to be educated, to explore what’s possible in the world beyond their teenage lives of texting and drama and, in some cases, hardship.

“When you meet a natural teacher, somebody who engages on that level, you feel it and you know it,” said Lobanov-Rostovsky. “It’s the real thing. And it’s worth honoring, it seems to me.”

High School Students & College Courses

High-School Students Are Helped by Taking College Courses, Study Finds

By ELYSE ASHBURN

Students who take college courses while in high school are more likely than their peers to graduate, to go on to college, and to do well in college, a new study suggests. The courses appear to be especially beneficial for male students, students from low-income families, and those who struggled academically in high school, according to a report on the study, "The Postsecondary Achievement of Participants in Dual Enrollment: An Analysis of Student Outcomes in Two States."

The study is one of the most comprehensive analyses to date of dual-enrollment programs, which allow students to take college classes for both high-school and college credit. It used longitudinal data to examine how the programs worked for students in two locations: the state of Florida and the city of New York. Dual-enrollment programs have increased in popularity in recent years as policy makers strive to increase the rigor of secondary education. But little research had been done on their effectiveness until now, according to the authors of the new study, who are affiliated with the Community College Research Center at Columbia University's Teachers College.

KAP & AP

(By David D. Huston, Co-Director, KAP; Article appeared in The Review, Ohio Council for the Social Studies, Summer 2001, vol. 37, number 1.)

One of the more interesting developments of recent years has been the expansion of the College Board's Advanced Placement Program. The AP program was originally introduced in the 1950's to allow students at elite East Coast boarding schools and some of the more ambitious suburban high schools to take college-level courses during their senior year and, depending how they did on a national examination, receive some sort of college credit. The scheme was attractive and the AP program has grown from its original, small-scale audience to a prestigious and prominent feature of many high schools. Indeed, so aware has the general public become of AP that the first thing many prospective parents, contemplating a move, ask of high school administrators or real estate agents is, "How many AP courses do you offer?" AP has become the universal measuring stick of the quality of a high school's academic program.

KAP's Story

AUTHORS: William Westfall and Peter Rutkoff

( KAP was previously SCAP)

THE GERM OF THE IDEA

The decade of the 1970's witnessed a wide-ranging national debate about the discontinuity of American education. Specifically, the traditional division between secondary school and college was subjected to close scrutiny as private and institutional voices were raised in concern over the considerable duplication of material which the brightest high school seniors often faced as college freshmen. Out of the long-deferred discussion devoted to easing this transition grew the idea that would become the School College Articulation Program.

In KAP We Go Deep

Alumni Bulletin Fall 2006

In KAP we go Deep

For nearly three decades, the Kenyon Academic Partnership has changed young lives by linking Kenyon professors to high-school teachers throughout Ohio.

by T.C. Brown

Mike Shelton '97 and Blossom Barrett, a current Kenyon junior, grew up a decade apart in different Ohio cities. Yet, as teenagers, both faced challenges that seemed to cut off any hope of college--any hope, indeed, of academic ambition even in high school.

Shelton, struggling through a tough childhood on Cleveland's west side, never met his biological father, and his stepfather was gone by the time he was twelve. Mike was bused to John Hay High School, finding himself one of the few white students in an inner-city school across town.

Barrett grew up in Columbus with her father, but by the time she reached Linden McKinley High School he had developed a debilitating nerve disease that gradually robbed him of the ability to walk or feed himself. Blossom cared for him until her senior year, when she and family members made the hard decision to move him to assisted living.