Kelly Mitchell Reflects on Three Decades of Discoveries at Wheeler

“Wheeler has been the most consistent thing in my life,” says Teacher of Modern Languages Kelly (Foss) Mitchell P’18, P’20. “I’ve been here more than half my life, by quite a bit. When I started teaching at Wheeler, I was 24 years old and just out of grad school. I remember at the final Faculty and Staff Meeting of that school year, they recognized Barbara Simpson, who was a beloved Lower School teacher, for being here for 31 years, and I thought to myself, ‘How could anyone be here for that long?’”

We asked Ms. Mitchell the same question now that she’s at that same point in her Wheeler tenure, and while we want to recognize her 31-year milestone at school, we’re also celebrating her because she will be leaving Wheeler this June. Since her arrival three decades ago, she’s become the most senior member of the Language Department – but as she reflects on her time at Wheeler, it’s vegetables and gardening, rather than Spanish and French, that first come to mind.

“I took a sabbatical in 2009, and that really changed the trajectory of the next 10 years,” she explains. “I’ve always been interested in environmental issues, and I got to start a school garden at the farm. It was big, like 30-by-50 feet, and when we built it, we had parent volunteers and Upper School students who helped construct all the raised beds. I also learned how to write grants so that I could pay for all the supplies. I spent the first part of the spring writing grant proposals, which I actually found to be super fun. One of the proposals had a creative component, where you had to explain your garden to an alien who came to Earth. I made a photo album with images of fairy houses and beautiful creatures, and I put together a little box of supplies from the forest that we’d use to make those fairy houses. I literally mailed the package in as part of my grant proposal, and I imagined someone sitting in a conference room in the city with these little bundles of sticks. That was a great grant.” (And clearly it was a great proposal.)

The garden seeded a lot of partnerships across school. She worked with students and faculty in the 6th-Grade Farm Program, and she collaborated with the entire Lower School, with each grade responsible for a different project. “For example, we had a three sisters garden for the 2nd grade with beans, squash, and corn. Or when the 4th grade was there, we would plant the potatoes – we had both gold and purple varieties, of course. A senior did their Free Inquiry Project with the garden, which was really cool. I spent time with her there, showing her how to use a level and other tools. It was really fun, and everything we produced was donated to a local food bank. All of that opened up my interest in gardening that to this day is an important part of my life.”

Ms. Mitchell says that doing something completely unrelated to her regular subject matter at Wheeler was definitely special, and it was an experience made possible because of Wheeler’s focus on exploration for students and teachers alike. That gardening sabbatical also grew into another incredible experience a few years later. “I applied for a fellowhip through the Toyota International Teacher program, and I would not have gotten that as just a language teacher, because it was all environmentally-based,” she says. “But since I had the gardening part, I had the opportunity to go to Costa Rica for two weeks with teachers from all over the country. They were mostly science teachers, and as one of the only Spanish speakers, I got to do a lot of interpreting for the group. We went into schools, we learned about sustainable living, and then we made lesson plans based on it, which I implemented in my Spanish classes when I returned. That was a really cool experience.”

One of the reasons she appreciated the experience so much, she adds, was the travel component. She’s always loved being in new places and discovering new things, and languages have helped her do both, often simultaneously. “I’ve always loved languages. I didn’t get to take a foreign language until I was in 9th grade because I went to a public school where that’s when you started. I began with Spanish and continued studying it in college. And then I tried French for fun. I fell in love with it, and decided to major in it. That’s why, if my students are struggling with something in class, I tell them they’re way ahead of where I was at their age – I didn’t even speak a word of French until I was 17. I thought I’d be a math major when I went to college, but I realized that languages are really my thing.

“Languages have also helped me immerse myself in different places, and it’s more fun for me if that’s a place with a different language. Whenever I travel, I always try to learn enough of the language to be able to interact with and really connect with people. I’ve even tried to learn Icelandic, which was very hard! This winter I started teaching myself Portuguese for an upcoming trip to Portugal in June, and I can’t wait to speak it with the locals.”

She always brought that same spirit into her teaching of languages at Wheeler. “Oral proficiency is our main focus. Students need to be able to write, of course, but oral efficiency is really our goal, and it’s fun to watch as students get to a point where they have experiences in the language they’re learning. In class, I have a lot of liberty to choose what I teach, and so one day the students and I might listen to this cool song that I just discovered in French, and we talk about lyrics in the song that are in the future tense, which is related to our current lesson. Or we’ll read an article in French about the effects of nanoplastics or other current events from this daily newsletter that I subscribe to. When I expose them to those things, I get to discover them, too.”

You might think that over 31 years, Ms. Mitchell didn’t have much more to discover at Wheeler. But she says each year – and each September in particular – always feels new. “I joke that every summer I practice retirement, and then every September is like New Year’s in a way. My New Year’s resolutions don’t come in January. They all come in September. I always have a list at the end of the school year of things I want to do differently next year. Maybe it’s focusing more on this, or wanting to cut this out, or wanting to do more projects like this. And so each year, I have this amazing opportunity to create, or maybe re-create. And every year I have a new group of students to teach but also to learn from. They’re always the same age, but I’ve gotten older. There’s something to be said for being able to connect with middle and high schoolers as you get older. Then when you see young people out in the world, you know you’re more open to seeing them as they are. I think as people get older, they tend to look at teenagers and just think of them as kids or they don’t understand them and have different judgments about them. Spending so much time with young people over the years has helped me see them for who they are and I think I’m more open to hearing their opinions because of that.

Unsurprisingly, Ms. Mitchell is planning to stay in motion after she leaves Wheeler. She’s going to do some extended travel that is related to her new, extended family. “It’s kind of a long story, but a couple years ago, before I got remarried, my current husband had a big family reunion in South Carolina. At first I was hesitant about attending because I wasn’t exactly family, but he convinced me to go. He said, ‘I really want you to meet them, and it’s not like a regular family reunion.’ And it wasn’t. It was like a school conference. There was an agenda! There was an opening meeting and there were breakout groups. It was amazing.

“They’re a Jewish family who was separated after World War II. After the war, one of the girls in the family, who had survived the Holocaust, had an uncle in Nice who gave her money to travel to Argentina. She went on to have a family in Argentina, but she never told them about this personal history. It only came out a few years ago when the mother had started seeing a psychiatrist, and one day the psychiatrist said he was going on vacation to Nice. She said she had family there, and asked if he would be willing to see if they were still there. She gave him their name, and while he was on vacation, he looked up the family, found them, and connected them with the woman. She is no longer alive, but the family members from Nice and family members from Argentina both came to the reunion. Because I speak Spanish, French, and English, those two families gravitated towards me in the beginning, and I found myself pulled into this four-day translation! That included helping the woman’s adult daughter, who now lives in Argentina, tell her story at the closing of the reunion to the entire group. Now, what I want to do is document that family history because it’s not recorded anywhere. I’m going to visit these families in Argentina and in southern France, and I’m going to document their story.

That trip, in which she helps to record this incredible personal story, will happen in the spring – the same season as her sabbatical in the garden back in 2009. First though, there will be another September, but it will be the first in over 30 years when she’s not at Wheeler. “I think that’s when this is really going to hit me,” she admits. “I’ll be working in my garden. And you know, September in Rhode Island is gorgeous, but I always feel like I never see September, because we’re so busy at school. There are new students and new parents. It’s great, but it’s also crazy in terms of the activity. So next September, I’m looking forward to being in the garden, and then traveling. It’s going to be a big transition for me and I will definitely miss being in the classroom with my students, but I’m eager to see what the next 31 years have in store!”