Jennifer Barrer-Gall is a new history teacher who grew up in Connecticut with a previous career in professional ballet. She was always interested in history since high school and is looking forward to seeing how students continue to leave their mark at the school.

What made you want to teach?

I was a professional ballet dancer for several years. I didn’t go to college right after high school, and when I did end up going to college — which was after sustaining a pretty significant injury — I started going to school part time while I was doing rehab for my ankle and beginning to teach ballet.  As I started teaching ballet, I also started diving deeper into my studies and declared a double major in English and history. And I decided, you know what, there’s got to be a way to combine all these different interests, of being with students and seeing them achieve what they want to achieve.

Can you tell me a little more about how you got into ballet?

My mom was a concert pianist, so I grew up with music in the household and would just start moving whenever she played, so she promptly enrolled me in ballet classes.  I eventually started training at a school in New York City.  

What are your impressions of BHS and how would you compare it to your high school?

I am so impressed with the level of engagement and discourse, the passions that students bring into the classroom, the questions that they bring, their sheer curiosity. As for my high school experience, in a way, it was similar. I grew up in a community very much like Brookline, though not nearly as religiously or ethnically diverse, but we had freedoms. In many ways coming here is kind of like seeing my own high school but from a different perspective, from a teacher’s point of view.

So what’s one thing you always try to remember in the classroom and try to project?

We’re all human. I make mistakes everyday, and yet, perhaps this is the ballet dancer in me, I am very much a perfectionist myself. So when I see students trying to achieve that perfection, and “Oh my gosh I didn’t get full points on this,” I try and remember that we are all in this together. This drive for perfection can really hamper us all, and so I try to remind students and myself that it’s not about perfection. It’s about the process. What are we learning, what are we doing, why are we doing it?  

Do you have anything in particular that you enjoy about high schoolers specifically?

I love that high schoolers are young adults. Adults and still young, but able to have conversations about the world, able to engage in what’s going on. Not that middle schoolers and elementary schoolers can’t do that, but it’s the level of dialogue that is very different. I really enjoy having these kind of adult conversations: conversations about politics, conversations about why things came to be the way they are, conversations about culture and society.

Did you know since you were young that history was something you were interested in?

People from my high school like to joke that I majored in history when I was in high school. The way that my school was divided, the lower 9 building was the home of the social studies wing and it’s where my locker happened to be.  It was also where I would eat lunch and do my work because I was commuting, I was training to be a ballet dancer, I had to get my work done during the school day. I got to know the history teachers, and those were the classes that I took my senior year.  I graduated early,  and so I only did a semester and I just took English and history electives at that point; I was done with science and math.