By Kylee Johnson
“I think the real question is why would I not pick LHS? Lincoln High is home,” says Social Studies teacher, Lindsey Herting. She is a new teacher this year at Lincoln High, but she taught last year at North Star. Previous to that, she was a sub for LPS and in 2011, she was a long term in the fall at Lincoln High for Social Studies teacher, Nancy Grant-Colson and then she was hired here as a Social Studies teacher.
Herting attended high school at Gross High in Omaha and then continued her education at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Growing up, education had always been important to her, not the mention that her mom is a teacher. Herting says, “I also love learning new things so a career in education seemed to be a good fit.” Knowing that she wanted to teach Social Studies was easy because she had always enjoyed her history and psychology classes when she was in school.
One of Herting’s biggest pet peeves is when a student says, “I’m sorry” for a certain behavior but then continues behaving the same way. Although, one way a student could gain brownie points with her is if when they miss a day of school, they approach her the next day and ask what they had missed the previous day. One of her most embarrassing moments is when she drank a Dr. Pepper at lunch and then she burped extremely loud in front her sixth period class.
She’s proud to be a Link and to be home. Herting says, “I hope to make students realize that knowledge really is a powerful thing.”
Another new teacher here at the High is a graduate from Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago is English teacher Jack Bisbee. He’s not only new to Lincoln High, but new to teaching in general. His first job was in the restaurant business as he worked, starting at the bottom, busting his tail. “I started as a waiter, like most people in the restaurant business. They start at the bottom. So I first had to bus tables and do all that stuff too during my training and that’s such a great thing to go through because you realize how hard those people work.” But after working hard, he decided to go back to school and pursue teaching, something that he had always wanted to do. To him, teachers were the kind of people that you could talk to about anything and expand your knowledge; whether it just be about a movie or commercial that didn’t make sense and wanted to talk about it, teachers were the kind of people that one could always do that with. Bisbee said, “I took a hard look at myself at one point, because I wasn’t a serious student, as we all can be, right? So I said, ‘Is this something I really wanna do?’ And so I got committed and became dedicated to becoming a great reader and writer. It’s always carried with me ever since.”
As a teacher, Bisbee hopes to change someone for the better. He wants to inspire his students to read something, whether it be a newspaper, a magazine, a comic book, and then relate it to their own life in some way. To gain brownie points with him, he says to participate. “Participating is a big thing. Sometimes we don’t hear from enough of our students and if they contribute to the conversation you’re having in class, that is such a big thing and success for them too because now their voice is heard and so that always encourages me to go back to them again and ask them questions. It just kind of brightens my day when I hear from somebody else, somebody I haven’t heard from before.”
This being his first school, Bisbee considers himself lucky. He loves Lincoln and couldn’t find anything negative to say. His favorite part about Lincoln High? The students. “I love the students, I really do. I have so many unique personalities in my classroom every single day, and I meet so many unique people in the hallways and that is such an encouraging thing. I like to see such diversity and strength in the people who walk through this building every day and that’s such a great thing for me to latch onto and also to change how I instruct the classroom. Because everyone is different, well I have to approach it differently every single day to kind of entice everybody. And that’s one of the greatest things about Lincoln High. The challenges we face here are like no other in Nebraska, that’s for sure. That makes coming here a real joy.”
