If you Google Michael Griffin’s career as a Bedford High School science teacher and administrator, you’ll find that it began before Google: a few weeks after he joined the faculty in the fall of 1996, two Ph.D. students at Stanford came up with the first search engine. They called it “BackRub.”
Griffin, whose impact on the high school and community culture has been broad and deep, will retire next week, as the academic year comes to an end.
“I just felt it was the right time,” he said. “The department is in a good place, where it can transition. I’m leaving a very strong department. The staff is really passionate about what they’re doing.”
“The kids have been absolutely fabulous – I’m going to miss that the most,” Griffin asserted. “I learn from the kids as much as I teach them.” He will miss the entire BHS community — he said it always has been his philosophy to get to know everybody in the building.
Over his 26-year Bedford High career, Griffin has taught general science and physical science (“those don’t exist anymore”), physics, marine science, biology, environmental issues. He has served as science program administrator for 21 years in grades 6-12.
His resume ranges from original class offerings and BHS community gardens to international travel and promoting women in science. And he still has time for weekly staff basketball games.
Griffin grew up in Chicago, and “as a kid I was always exploring,” during family vacations to the Rockies or Florida waterways. He initially wanted to be a veterinarian. “I always liked science and I always liked helping people, so those two things pushed me onto teaching.”
At the University of Illinois, he moved from pre-veterinary to “a whole variety of science courses,” which resulted in “teaching licenses for everything.” He was recruited during spring break of senior year for his first teaching job in Columbia, SC. “That’s where I first started getting kids outdoors, working with soil.”
Griffin’s next position was as a science specialist in the Lawrence schools, where he worked for five years. He especially remembers that “the kids took care of that garden every summer. Have a little faith in our students – they will do wonderful things.”
“I always wanted to teach in high school,” Griffin related. He was interviewed by Principal Thomas Duggan, Science Department Chair Kathy Krueger, and – he thinks – Assistant School Superintendent Robert Hentz. After he was hired, beginning in September 1996, “Bill Keup walked me around the building.”
Griffin has a sense of history – the desk in his office was used by former Business Manager John Antonucci, and the chair belonged to former Superintendent Dr. Maureen Lacroix.
From the start, Griffin said, he “fell in love with it. The staff needs to know that this is a very special place.” Besides the school’s family atmosphere, “the support we got from the community has been overwhelming. I can’t thank the community enough.”
Along the way he earned a master’s degree at Lesley College and actually taught there for a year. “I had them doing the labs. They are real things, not theoretical.”
Griffin is proud of his accomplishments, particularly in the area of curriculum expansion. When he and his teachers propose a change, “We do our homework. Having open dialogue is the best thing.”
One of the most significant changes, approved more than a decade ago, was to reconfigure the high-school core science sequence so students would take physics first.
Courses added or expanded over the years are forensics, robotics, astronomy, and Advanced Placement courses. He started the environmental course – “I had to convince Tom Duggan to let me teach five-and-a-half classes.” Now it’s an AP offering. “The staff has tried to be inventive,” he said. “The School Committee and administration have allowed us to grow and adapt.”
The same growth took place with extracurricular clubs. “Give me six kids who are passionate about something and we can make it happen,” Griffin said. “What we’ve done is make sure the focus is on the students.” That means there are sometimes midcourse corrections, such as with the level of robotics competition.
Hundreds of students will remember Griffin especially for the scores of school trips he arranged, including at least 16 “big trips.”
More than 20 years ago, “Hannah Ullman said, ‘We should go to the jungle somewhere.” The result was his first international trip, to Belize.
There were many closer destinations as well – forest and mountain hikes, lectures, the Harvard Museum of Natural History, the sewage treatment plant on Deer Island. “The whole thing is about exposing kids to the world. Science isn’t just in the classroom,” Griffin observed. All the trips “give the students new experiences, and that’s always a great thing.”
He developed the annual Women of Science Scholarship Competition almost 20 years ago thanks to an anonymous grant, Griffin related. Recent events have involved as many as 45 teams of junior and senior high school women competing in four science and engineering events.
Griffin launched recycling at the high school; they began with some buckets and helpful custodians who rescued cans and bottles. He spent a lot of time in the summer at the high school over the years, to take inventory or care for the students’ gardens. “I didn’t get paid but it needed to be done – that’s what makes this place special.”
“It’s very important to get to know your students as people,” Griffin affirmed. He particularly values the military dependents who have been part of the BHS student population for almost 60 years. “W have students who come from everywhere – I remember two sisters who said this was their 12th school. And they jumped into everything.”
The Hanscom delegation evokes memories of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001: “It was so traumatic, so personal.” Griffin recalled he was at the middle school when the first plane hit the World Trade Center; by the time he walked over to BHS, every television was on, followed by an announcement to turn them off. At the end of the school day, Hanscom students couldn’t get back on base until more was known about the attacks, he added.
Griffin’s “retirement” sounds more like a lateral transfer. After climbing all 67 New England peaks that exceed 4,000 feet, he is now eyeing the Adirondacks. He is thinking about affiliating with the National Park Service in some capacity – he is already certified as a “wilderness first-responder. I did that because of the trips.”
In September, Griffin will give himself a “retirement present” with a trip to Machu Picchu, the Inca ruins high in the mountains of Peru.
Still, “that’s going to be the hardest month for me,” Griffin reflected.
Mike Rosenberg can be reached at [email protected], or 781-983-1763
Loading ...
