12 years ago, Spanish teacher Ms. Amy Gantt was trying to get her “foot in the door” in the Oregon education scene after moving from Waco, Texas. Ms. Gantt, an already seasoned educator, hoped to continue pursuing her lifelong love of teaching and to find a job as a language teacher after following her husband across the country.

While working part-time at one of Benson High School’s summer programs, Ms. Gantt was applying for teaching positions through a program similar to the Common App, when her husband used it to submit her resume to a school in the Milwaukie area called La Salle Catholic College Preparatory.

He told her that he had applied for a job on her behalf, Ms. Gantt said. To which she responded, “Excuse me?”

At first, Ms. Gantt was hesitant, having no previous teaching experience at a private school before. But as she began reading about the school and the Lasallian mission, she was sold on the position and decided to move forward. 

She got the job, and now in her 13th year at the school, has been recognized as the Lasallian Educator of the Year by her colleagues.

The Lasallian Educator of the Year award is the annual recognition of a staff who best embodies the values of St. John Baptist de La Salle in the eyes of the rest of the staff and is consistently dedicated to the principles of Lasallian education and their students’ well-being. As explained in the criteria shared prior to the vote on nominations, it aims to spotlight an educator who displays exemplary commitment to their faith, students, work, and support for the community. 

Ms. Gantt said that she was honored to be selected for this award, seeing it as a huge validation as well as a grounding experience. “It’s just really humbling to know that your colleagues see what you’re doing — at least, what you’re trying to do — and they want to recognize you for that,” she said.

Ms. Gantt’s first full-time teaching experience was at a high school level for Spanish I, II, and III. She was 22 years old, and some of her students were 18, which, according to her, taught her a lot about classroom management.

She learned how other teachers can serve as mentors, acknowledging in particular one of the educators she taught alongside and how they provided her great mentorship and a lot of resources.

“It was my first year of teaching, and it was her last year of teaching,” Ms. Gantt said. “It was a beautiful partnership, because I really looked up to her, and she… took me under her wing and helped me out.”

Community involvement is very important to her, and it’s one of the main differences between her experience at La Salle and her previous work. 

Ms. Gantt views herself and the other two Spanish teachers, Ms. Karen Kessler and Ms. Lisa Moran, as a cohesive, dynamic team, bouncing ideas off each other, collaborating, and chatting during passing and free periods.

“It’s this wonderful, collaborative team effort where we’re really in touch with what each other is doing,” she said. “That has truly allowed me to grow as a teacher, just to not be in my own classroom, on my own island.”

Ms. Gantt actively seeks out that same sense of fellowship in her church as well. Growing up in a religious household, she can’t remember a time when she didn’t attend church services with her family, who were both members of the Evangelical Free Church and the Baptist Church.

Today, she is very involved in her Lutheran parish community, playing the drums, participating in the bell choir, and bringing support as a member of the parent group.

“It’s a driving force,” Ms. Gantt said. “It grounds us.”

The commitment to community has been a deciding factor in the variety and volume of activities she has participated in throughout her life. Ms. Gantt undertook coaching and choreographed color guard during her first teaching job, and in her Baptist Student Union group in college, she and other members helped create a safe space for kids to wait after school until their parents picked them up.

Ms. Gantt was also a member of the color guard and the concert band as a percussionist during high school, both of which encouraged her and strengthened her commitment to hard work and cooperation.

“I’m not a soloist out there,” Ms. Gantt said. “I’m part of a larger team.”

Ms. Gantt’s musical inclination is something she intentionally fosters as a member of the bell choir at her church in addition to playing drums with the modern worship team, which reflects her time as a percussionist during high school.

“I feel like it rounded me out, because I was super academic in high school,” Ms. Gantt said. “It let me escape from the academics a little bit, and it addressed that artsy side, that creativity side, and that has stuck with me.”

Here at La Salle, Ms. Gantt is the National Honor Society (NHS) adviser, a role she was asked to take on in part because of her prior experience as co-advisor to the NHS chapter of one of her previous schools.

She was also a member of her school’s NHS chapter during her junior and senior years of high school. During that time, Ms. Gantt agreed to tutor another student in math. She was working on a proof with the girl she was tutoring when it suddenly clicked for her.

“It was that moment where this light bulb went off, where it’s like, ‘I helped her understand something, and she kind of enjoyed it,’” Ms. Gantt said. “And so I was like, ‘Wait, I can teach.’”

She described how, as a student, there were instances where she saw her own light bulbs go off, and sometimes, but not as often with fellow students. In contrast, as an educator, she gets to see that from all of her students while she teaches.

“You don’t just see it through one person’s eyes, but you see it through hundreds of people’s eyes all the time,” she said.

While education has more or less been the dream job for Ms. Gantt her whole life, Spanish was not always her focus. She enjoyed math, especially algebra, but a hopeful algebra teacher can’t only learn algebra — she would have had to progress through each higher level of math to come back and teach it.

As that did not interest her, having succeeded in four years of learning the language in high school, Ms. Gantt decided that rather than math, she’d try her hand at becoming a Spanish teacher, a choice which ultimately played well into her interests.

“I love being with people,” she said. “I love sharing the Spanish language and the culture and being able to provide opportunities for people and tell them about how many doors this can open for them in their future.”

Ms. Gantt had the opportunity to put that passion to use several times in her junior and senior year of high school while on mission trips with her church to border towns in Mexico.

She also strengthened her Spanish skills during these trips, as she was one of only two people on the missions who spoke the language. She noted how helpful it was to put more specialized vocabulary into practice, such as using words associated with plumbing when her group built a bathroom for a village.

They built various structures to support the communities they visited, such as a playground for a church, a safer sidewalk, and a plumbed bathroom. Ms. Gantt recalled a particular trip where her group organized and conducted Vacation Bible School for the children in one of the towns while building them a house.

Ms. Gantt attended Baylor University in Waco, Texas, where her father taught electrical engineering. She studied Elementary Education with a specialization in Spanish, and in her sophomore year of college, she developed an interest in Baylor’s study abroad program.

She initially inquired about the six-week exchange program to Mexico, but at her instructor’s suggestion, she ended up signing up for a semester-long study abroad in Mexico City for the second half of her sophomore year.

“And so I called my parents,” Ms. Gantt said, laughing. “I’m like, ‘I think I’m gonna go to Mexico for a semester.’”

She had the opportunity to experience the country alongside her roommate Eunice, who was from Mexico and learning English as a second language. This was an invaluable assistance to Ms. Gantt’s progress in Spanish, because the two of them were able to practice their language skills with each other.

Ms. Gantt found a way to become involved in the community even in a foreign country, discovering a church to attend weekly with her roommate and playing on a recreational intramural softball team.

“There’s nothing like being coached in another language,” Ms. Gantt said. “It was a really cool experience.”

As a newly-minted college graduate, she was ready to launch her teaching career from the get-go. Then, a good friend and fellow Baylor graduate clued Ms. Gantt about a six-week program through Middlebury College in Vermont to teach Spanish before spending a year abroad in Spain.

“And I was like, ‘Oh, wait, I get to live in Spain for a year?’” Ms. Gantt said. “‘Where do I sign up?’”

The same year she was accepted into the program, she and her cohort stayed in Madrid, Spain from September to May. Ms. Gantt and her friend lived together with their host, who, according to Ms. Gantt, was an “amazing cook.”

“Some of the stuff I eat every time I go back to Spain is because she introduced me to it,” Ms. Gantt said. “It’s so amazing.”

She had classes from Monday through Thursday, and, utilizing the time afforded by their extra day off, Ms. Gantt and her roommate bought train passes to explore the country.

They traveled to places such as Barcelona, Cordoba, Galicia, Granada, San Sebastián, and Seville. Ms. Gantt said the pair “tried to keep it a little bit more local” for their second semester.

“Just the places that you could take a day train trip to,” she said. “So we really got to see a lot of the country.”

One of Ms. Gantt’s favorite places to be in Spain was in Madrid: an art museum called the Museo del Prado, officially known as Museo Nacional del Prado.

Though she said she was “never really into art,” Ms. Gantt attributes this appreciation for the museum to an art teacher she had while in Spain, who taught them the history and context behind the works. As homework, she and her class were instructed to go to the Museo del Prado and examine the art firsthand.

“And it’s not like we’re studying a picture in the book,” Ms. Gantt said. “We’re not studying a replica. This was the year 2000, and I’m sitting there three feet from a painting that was painted 500 years ago or 400 years ago… that was just amazing to me.”

The rich culture that Ms. Gantt was immersed in while living in Spain was what cemented her time abroad as an incredibly important part of her life.

Ms. Gantt highly recommends that students study abroad and talk to native speakers, though she acknowledges that a foundation of knowledge and language skills is necessary so that they can build on it during the experience. It’s that sort of cumulative method that Ms. Gantt would describe her teaching style as, calling it a “constant feedback loop.”

“So I’m teaching, you’re practicing,” Ms. Gantt said. “I’m letting you know how you’re doing, you’re working it out, you’re molding, you’re making mistakes, and that’s okay.”

She believes that alongside that zeal for education, a good teacher needs to have a strong sense of diligence, a solid work ethic, and a productive balance between rest and work. At its core, that passion for teaching and helping people is held aloft by a strenuous amount of effort and organization.

“You cannot be a teacher who’s lazy and effective, in my opinion,” Ms. Gantt said. “You have to work hard; you have to want it for your students.”

At the beginning of her teaching career, Ms. Gantt sometimes struggled to understand what her students were grappling with in regards to workload and the difficulty of their assignments. 

If she could go back, she would tell herself to “see the student in front of you and where they’re coming from,” she said.

That shifted perspective came both with more years of teaching under her belt and when she became a mom. As Ms. Gantt raised teenagers herself, she grew to understand everything on her students’ plates a bit more personally, as she got to witness it from inside her home.

Education runs in Ms. Gantt’s family, as her parents, brother, aunt, cousin, and her husband have all worked in education, teaching subjects from electrical engineering to campaign rhetoric. For Ms. Gantt, this scholastic heritage was one of the main things that helped develop her desire to be a teacher at a young age. 

However, for Ms. Gantt, her passion as an educator comes from the satisfaction of teaching itself rather than simply following in her family’s footsteps.

“That curiosity, that desire to want to do something, it’s very refreshing to me,” Ms. Gantt said. “I think it’s what makes me keep coming back, because I get to keep seeing new brands and new forms of curiosity every time.”