Today we’d like to introduce you to Gwendolyn McPhail
Hi Gwendolyn , we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
I was raised by two teachers, one a college professor of education and one a kindergarten teacher in a rural community close to our home. I always loved animals, particularly horses, and brought home numerous abandoned or injured critters over the years of my childhood. After spending my sophomore year in college trying to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up, I landed in the College of Agriculture and knew I had found my destiny. After completing a BS in Animal Science, I managed a large farm for several years before marrying and seeking a more family friendly career in teaching. I became a National Board Certified Science teacher, teaching a wide variety of courses from 7th grade Life Science to High School Physics, Food Science and Livestock Production. I retired from teaching after 31 years, helped form an agricultural non-profit to bring back the first ag-focused county fair in over 90 years to our community. Our goal was to educate the citizens regarding where their food comes from and the benefits of healthy eating and to encourage young people to seek careers in agriculture. I also served on our county’s Planning Commission for 12 years. Covid brought a year of inactivity during which I focused wholeheartedly on preparing for publication a manuscript written by my great-grandfather about an Indigenous boy who survived the massacre at Wounded Knee only to end up in his classroom on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, marking the child’s first steps on a difficult path into the US government’s Indian Education Movement. The book, My Place Among Them, was published by Koehler Books in August of 2023.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
I’ve been incredibly blessed throughout my life, but we never lived on “easy street” to say the least. At the time that our children were small, my teaching salary was only about $7600 per year and our family farm carried massive debt due to the policies of the Carter administration. Just paying the bills was a struggle some months. Dreaming simply wasn’t in the budget. When my father passed away, I not only lost my best advisor, but I also gained a major new goal….to publish his grandfather’s work. For the next twenty-two years, I pulled out the manuscript often, only to put it back in its box and wish for more uninterrupted time to work on it. When Covid brought the world to a standstill, I thought it would just be a matter of polishing up the manuscript before sending it off to a publisher and waiting for a check.
Little did I know how much the publishing industry had changed over the twenty plus years since my father had worked on the project. There were more hurdles than I had considered. From sending the manuscript to a Beta reader to see if society would find value in such a divisive story to finding an editor who was dedicated to my story instead of their own, to waiting on comments and making changes to the manuscript before sending it off again, the waiting was the most difficult part. I was ready. I thought it was a story that needed to be told. Waiting was hard for me.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
Early in my career, I saw that many of our students lacked important critical thinking skills as well as research and questioning skills. I made the teaching of these skills the main focus of my classroom activities. I wanted my students to feel confident looking up answers rather than spitting them back to me so I often gave them three minutes at the end of each test to use their notes to check their answers in an effort to encourage all students to review materials they’d been given as part of their classroom activities. I also used problem solving questions as part of my opening instructional materials. These were not questions about details or facts from previous lessons, but rather questions about how to find answers about an unknown topic or questions from research materials that were available in my classroom library. Over the years, I saw more and more emphasis placed on grades rather than learning including such practices as changing grades when parents complained or making sure certain student grades were high enough to ensure scholarships despite any lack of effort by the individual students. By the early 2000’s, I had begun to come home and tell my husband I would hate to fly on a plane if some of my, then current, students became the engineers or mechanics of those planes in the future. Eventually, I became highly critical of school policies that didn’t allow teachers to give a grade of zero even if NO work had been turned in by the student, that permitted students who missed class to “make-up” that class after school with no effect on his/her grade, and required teachers to award passing grades for work that was turned in late or often not turned in at all. In the last ten years of my teaching, I had the opportunity to teach food science. Rather than focus on the actual science of food, I chose to teach life skills that revolved around food. My courses included such basics as following recipes, safety in the kitchen, cutting up a whole chicken for more cost effective access to proteins, planning simple healthy meals and etiquette such as setting a table, serving the public and helping each other at the end of the meal. My greatest goal was for my students to be successful in life rather than in my classroom.
Any big plans?
In the future, I hope to write a second novel about Hannah, the daughter of one of the protagonists in My Place Among Them.
I also hope to dedicate more time to reflective writing on my website, www.jstanion.com.
My dream is to make time to draw as well so that I can preserve the scenes of life on a small family farm before small family farms vanish forever.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.jstanion.com
- Instagram: jstanion1890
- Facebook: JStanion
- LinkedIn: Gwendolyn C McPhail
- Twitter: @jstanion1890
Image Credits
Head shot is Sweet Honeycomb Photography LLC
Other photographs are mine personally
Book Awards are per award company
