Never stop teaching to those who've never stopped learning
Dianne Bumgarner devoted her professional career to teaching high school students the history of America and the rich heritage that has been bequeathed them.
Now, in her retirement, she is still teaching, but to a vastly different group of students — several dozen residents of the Covenant Village retirement community in Gastonia.
Bumgarner, 75, grew up in the Lucia area of northeastern Gaston County and in fact, after stops in Raleigh and in Charlotte, lives there now.
Despite urgings from her mother and others to major in home economics, Bumgarner chose to pursue her love of history in her college studies, first at UNC Greensboro and then at UNC Chapel Hill.
“I was pretty adamant about what I wanted to do,” she recalled, laughing, “and I definitely did not want to be a home economics teacher.”
Bumgarner first taught for a few years in Wake County before stepping away from the profession for more than a decade to devote time to her three young children.
Returning to teaching, she completed two years at East Mecklenburg High in Charlotte before a brief stop at Cramerton Junior High.
She then settled at Ashbrook High School, just a couple of miles from Covenant Village, where she taught history, primarily the Advanced Placement American history course, for nearly two decades.
She concluded her service with five years at East Gaston High.
So how does a veteran educator come to be teaching a weekly seminar at Covenant Village?
“It was more than two decades ago,” Bumgarner responded. “Covenant Village had called Gaston College asking if anyone there would be interested in teaching an American history seminar. No one was and the call eventually came to me.”
“I decided to give it a try,” she remembered. “It was during the summer, but then it just kept going forward.”
Getting rich quickly was certainly not Bumgarner’s goal in accepting the assignment. Her initial pay was the princely sum of 20 bucks a week. After some 20 years, that amount was increased to $25 a week and just recently that amount was raised to $50 a week.
So if the lure is not large sums of cash, why does Bumgarner devote hours of preparation each week for the seminar which meets on Tuesday afternoons from 3:30 to 4:30?
“Because they enjoy it so much,” she said of her Covenant Village students, “and because I do also.”
“They ask a lot of hard questions,” she added. “I have to study and I have to prepare and I have to be on my toes.”
Bumgarner says one of her goals is to make her teaching as unbiased and un-opinionated as possible. “My hope is that they will never know which political party I belong to.”
It takes roughly two years, she explained, to move from the first inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere to the inauguration of President Barack Obama in 2009.
The survey stops there, she said, because, “No president can be historically evaluated until they have been out of office for at least 20 years.”
The seminar I sit in on concerns primarily the presidential election of 1936 — an election which saw incumbent Franklin Roosevelt utterly demolish Republican nominee Alf Landon.
Some 40 Covenant Village residents are on hand, with most of them arriving well before the 3:30 start time. Bumgarner provides fresh doughnuts to all who want them, but the early arrivals are more eager to talk to Bumgarner than to satisfy their sweet tooths.
Watching Bumgarner teach is like watching a master conductor guide a symphony orchestra. She uses modern Powerpoint technology, she skillfully poses questions, she interjects unexpected humor, she utilizes music.
She is, in short, the consummate professional.
“As long as (the residents) are enjoying it, I’ll keep coming back,” Bumgarner said. “There are so many wonderful people here, people who have extraordinary stories of their own to share. This truly is a labor of love.”
Bill Poteat may be reached at wlpoteat@yahoo.com.
This article originally appeared on The Gaston Gazette: Never stop teaching to those who've never stopped learning
