John Shanagher in a BMS classroom. The history teacher said
he enjoyed his career and the people with whom he worked.
BLOOMFIELD, NJ — Retiring after 37 years as a middle school teacher, John Shanagher said he would stay if not for the commute from his Bridgewater home.
“In all honesty, it’s killing me,” he said last week in his Bloomfield Middle School classroom. “It’s 40 miles each way. If I lived in Bloomfield still, I would work for another five years.”
Shanagher was raised on Linden Avenue and his family moved to Montclair when he was a fifth-grader. He graduated from Montclair High School in 1972.
“Going to the Montclair-Bloomfield football game and being on the wrong side was a tough call,” he said.
He has worked at three Bloomfield middle schools — North Junior, North Middle and currently, BMS. But all these schools were the same building with only the names changing.
He met his future wife, Eileen, at the school. She was a student teacher at Montclair State University which was contacted for an emergency substitute music director for a Christmas concert.
“She was very stern and really cute,” Shanagher recalled. “And I thought — that’s her. I owe a lot to this building and she is the biggest part of it.”
Shanagher and his wife had four children. He received his teaching certification from Jersey City State College, now called New Jersey City University.
“It was $200-and-something a semester,” he said. “And I was able to finance my career by working at Holstein’s.”
A year after his college graduation, he received his master’s in secondary education.
“So much of life is a fluke,” he said. “I never applied to Bloomfield for work. My mom worked in a dentist’s office and she said to a patient that he looked familiar.”
The patient was the Bloomfield superintendent of schools at the time, Robert Morris. He told Shanagher’s mother to have her son come in and apply for a job. Shanagher had applied to the Morris Hills district, but the car he was driving was in poor shape, so he applied in Bloomfield, too. He was hired as a history teacher.
“I remember my first day teaching,” he said. “I thought I was coming in for a last interview. But I was put into a classroom that had driven out two subs and was frustrating the principal. It was the third week in September. It feels like yesterday. I can’t believe it’s over.”
Shanagher taught history for 33 years and for the last four years has taught gifted and talented students.
“It’s a great way to end a career, a great way to explore,” he said. “You’re not locked in. It’s tapped a different part of my brain. It was a challenge. A great way to keep myself excited for coming to work.”
What connects Shanagher’s time as a history teacher and the gifted and talented program is his students’ participation in the annual, statewide mock trial competition. This is sponsored by the NJ Bar Association.
In this competition, the association provides a theme based on a U.S constitutional amendment; students create an imaginary case testing that theme. The program began in 1996. BMS has won 37 awards since that time. In 1996, Shanagher and Manuela Gonnella served as mock trial advisors. Gonnella currently works at Bloomfield High School.
“She’s the only person in the state that is better than me,” he said.
Shanagher said he was most proud of his mock trial work. On the refrigerator door at home he keeps a letter from a former student. She is now at Montclair State University as a history and pre-law student. She wrote that she has chosen this course because of her mock trial experience.
“I think the mock trials have inspired kids to look at history as something they should be proud of,” Shanagher said, “and that the law should govern their lives.”
Similar to all long-careered educators say, he said technology is the big change in education.
“It removes the sage-on-the-stage — the 63-year-old Mr. Shanagher expounding on history,” he said. “When you lose that human contact, that spark is missing. There’s a piece that’s missing from a person with life’s experience. Sometimes you have to tell a story for a student to appreciate something. My memories of the teachers I loved are all personal.
“All my history teachers made me want to learn more,” he said. “They made historical figures come alive. Hopefully, I did that. I’m not putting Chromebooks down, but you don’t get that from a Chromebook.”
To be a teacher, Shanagher said a person needs a sense of humor.
“If you haven’t had a belly laugh by nine o’clock in the morning, you should be doing something else,” he said. “You also need empathy. These kids are all coming from someplace and sometimes completing the homework assignment isn’t the most important thing. You also need structure and to be a role model.”
Shanagher said structure means that a teacher must be knowledgeable.
“A little story about George Washington isn’t going to captivate a class,” he said. “If a kid asks a question, you can’t go to a Chromebook. You have to keep up with history. When I was learning history, it was about what happened. But I tried to teach why it happened.”
Shanagher was also the president of the Bloomfield Education Association, the local school union, from 1998 to 2016.
“I became BEA president the night Hurricane Floyd hit New Jersey,” he said. “There is no connection, but some people would dispute that.”
His most memorable day as a teacher, he said, was Sept. 11, 2001, the day terrorists attacked the World Trade Center. Shanagher knew about the attack from the office, but the students did not because they had no smartphones or computers. He went back to his class, told them, and handed out his cell phone so they could call home. When the towers fell, cell phone coverage stopped.
“It was an intense day, as if the world was coming to an end,” he said.
People had told him he would know when it was time to retire. That moment happened his first day back to work from the most recent Christmas vacation. He was taking down the classroom Christmas tree and thought he would never be doing it again. He went home and applied for retirement.
“It sounds dramatic,” he said. “It was not.”
In retirement, Shanagher said he may substitute teach a couple times a week and do volunteer work for victims rights.
“There probably are things I could have done better, but I don’t know what they are,” he said. “I loved every minute of it. If you can say that after 37 years, you had a really good career.”
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