A portrait of Pauline Pichette Matthew Thornton art teacher in running for teacher of the year

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May 14, 2008

By Suzanne Laurent

LONDONDERRY — Pauline Pichette loves to show off her oversized scrapbook filled with newspaper clippings, photos of visits to the Currier Museum of Art and announcements of awards her students have received over the 27 years she has been an art teacher at Matthew Thornton Elementary School.

Pichette and 24 other teachers from across the state nominated for New Hampshire Teacher of the Year were honored at a ceremony on May 6 in Concord sponsored by the Department of Education.

She'll be the first to tell you about something wonderful accomplished by a student, but she's shied away from the spotlight on herself.

"(Principal) Carol Mack nominated me," Pichette said. "I had to write an essay about a message I would give to other teachers."

Pichette thought back to the day she got her first teaching job.

"It was an incredible feeling," she said. "After all the years at school, student teaching and all the interviews — to know you finally have a job."

Pichette said she recalled hearing a teacher during her early years of teaching tell the principal the she "was all burnt out."

"The principal told her, 'you've never been lit'," she said.

"That's what you have to always remember — how you felt the day you got your teaching position," Pichette said. "The message I wrote to other teachers (in the essay) is to always stay lit and keep the momentum going. Always be positive."

Pichette, who had to work out of a closet since the mid-1980s when the school district was overcrowded, finally got a classroom to herself last fall and enjoyed choosing furniture and setting up the room to be educational and kid-friendly.

A color wheel is set up in the reading area and a board will display an artist each month.

"We'll go from A to Z," Pichette said. This first artist was photographer Ansel Adams.

An Alexander Calder mobile hangs over her desk and her classroom overlooks a small garden that includes a tree that one of her students won in a national Arbor Day poster contest.

Pichette loves to teach about the environment and ecology, and each year her fifth-grade students enter the New Hampshire Arbor Day poster contest. A student from her class has won the state award five times, including the one who took the national award in 1986.

Pichette uses her art lessons to give students lessons about life.

"Take Toulouse Lautrec," she said. "He had dwarfism, but it didn't stop him from painting posters of the Moulin Rouge in Paris."

Ten years ago, Pichette started an outreach program with the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester for her fourth-grade class.

"The fourth-graders learn about the history of New Hampshire, and I found a way to bring them to the museum to see furniture and artwork from the state," she said.

Pichette and her fellow nominees will now go through on-site visits and more interviews to compete for the title of 2009 New Hampshire Teacher of the Year.