Russell Denette

Mayflower High School Employee of the Year

Russell Denette sits at a lectern he made for his Mayflower High School classroom, where he teaches English and journalism. Denette, 28, is the licensed Employee of the Year for the high school. One of his former students, Millennia Williams, said Denette is a “great mentor as well as teacher.”
Russell Denette sits at a lectern he made for his Mayflower High School classroom, where he teaches English and journalism. Denette, 28, is the licensed Employee of the Year for the high school. One of his former students, Millennia Williams, said Denette is a “great mentor as well as teacher.”

Russell Denette, who was chosen as a Mayflower High School Employee of the Year, has a simple teaching philosophy.

“Really, it’s students first,” he said.

The 28-year-old teaches 10th-grade English, Pre-Advanced Placement English and journalism.

“I teach them what I’m teaching them because it’s going to help them, and I try to make sure their needs are met in whatever area they need. Particularly if I notice a kid who doesn’t have warm clothes in the winter, I will let the counselor know. If they’re sleeping in class, I’ll pull them aside and try to help them figure out how to get more sleep, instead of sending them to the office.

“That’s the level I live on — understanding I’m there to help them as a human being, and the way I help them is, hopefully, by teaching them to be good readers, writers and thinkers.”

Denette said he doesn’t know who nominated him for the award.

“I was very surprised, very, very surprised. I’m thrilled to get it,” he said. “The folks who’ve gotten it the past five years are people I really look up to. They’re fantastic teachers, so it’s an honor to be in their ranks.”

Mayflower Superintendent John Gray said Denette was chosen by his co-workers, who recommend an employee to the administration, “so he’s obviously doing well in the opinion of his peers.”

Gray said Denette stands out because of his creativity.

“He does some neat things. In a fundraiser, he had some teachers come in, and they rated hot chili peppers from the strongest to the weakest. They ate them, mild to really, really hot ones, and videoed it and put it on YouTube. They had a blast,” Gray said, laughing. “That’s the sort of thing he does.”

Denette, who grew up in Sherwood, said he knew in high school that he wanted to teach.

“I wanted a chance to invest in people,” he said.

Several high school teachers inspired him.

“They made me feel like it was a good job to go into,” he said.

Denette said the first teacher who comes to mind was his high school chemistry teacher, Michael Johnson, an award-winning teacher at Sylvan Hills, where Denette taught his first three years out of college.

“He was great because his course was good — chemistry was neat and all, but it wasn’t really my thing — but he still related to us and made the subject interesting to us,” Denette said. “I enjoyed the fact that he was willing to talk to us as human beings instead of a didactic overlord who just scowled at us from the front of the classroom.”

Johnson said Denette was “an excellent student.”

“He was always an active participant in class discussions and seemed to have a unique understanding of the concepts and how they applied to everyday life. As such, I truly enjoyed having him as a student and was thrilled that his first teaching job would be at Sylvan Hills as I had no doubt that he would be a valued member of the faculty and an excellent teacher. … I saw his passion for teaching and his desire to see his students succeed.”

Denette majored in English with teaching licensure at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway.

“Basically, I like English because you can eventually work yourself around to why you’re right; you can reason with words,” he said.

While teaching at Sylvan Hills, Denette, who lives in Conway, wanted to work closer to home and found the position in Mayflower. He and his wife, Aryn, have a 1-year-old son, Fox.

Denette, other than being an award-winning teacher, is a professional woodworker.

“I’m a fourth-generation woodworker,” he said. “My dad, when I was a kid, would watch Yankee Workshop on PBS. He had a whole workshop in the backyard. There’s a picture of when I was like 2, sitting on the steps of his workshop with a piece of wood and sandpaper, just sanding away at it.”

Denette said that one summer when he was in college, he started a project with his dad.

“We made an armchair that’s still sitting in my living room,” Denette said. “We spent an entire summer after my freshman year of college making that chair.”

Denette said he started woodworking in earnest in 2014 when he and his wife bought a house, and he turned their garage into a workshop. His wife was amenable to that arrangement, he said, because her father is a woodworker, too.

Denette has a business, Denette Woodworks, “which I like because it’s a name and a sentence,” he said.

Using cherry, his favorite wood, or other Arkansas woods, he creates pieces that include kitchen tables and even lamps.

To celebrate their son being born, Denette said, he made a midcentury-style side table that has hand-cut dovetails; the only metal in the piece is the drawer pulls. The rest is very carefully assembled wood, which is very difficult,” he said. “I had a good time making that,” adding that it took two months.

“It’s really satisfying to be able to get to the end of the day and have made something, instead of saying, ‘Well, I read a collection of Robert Frost’s nature poems’ and expounding on themes of existentialism in nature poetry. It’s nice to point and say, ‘I did that,’” Denette said.

“More or less, teaching pays for us to live, and woodworking pays for itself and for us to have fun,” he said.

Not only does he make most of the furniture in his home; Denette made a lectern and stool for his classroom. He has toyed with the idea of full-time woodworking.

“I’m just kind of playing it by ear at the moment. There’s part of me that would like doing it full time, but then I’d miss teaching, too,” he said.

“Mayflower has been fantastic; I like the pace of a smaller school,” Denette said.

“My journalism class is kind of unconventional. We do the school news. Instead of a newspaper, we do a newscast. It’s posted online,” he said.

“When I got to the school, there was not much as far as a journalism curriculum. The way the class has been, almost like a year-long project — in that class, I tend to take less the role of teacher and more of facilitator or producer of the news,” Denette said. “I give them the tools, show them how to use those tools and hold them to the expectation to create a news show. They’re steering the ship; I just make sure the engine doesn’t blow up.

“The journalism class is not related to print; it’s related to using language as a means of communication.”

Journalism is no longer required to be offered as an elective for high school in the Arkansas Department of Education’s new standards.

“It’s an important class because it teaches students to communicate well, and a special thing is they get real feedback from a real audience,” he said.

Denette said he especially enjoys teaching literature in his English classes.

“Catch-22 is my favorite novel. It’s a behemoth, so I only do it with my Pre-AP students,” he said.

He also introduces his students to Night, by Elie Wiesel, the author’s autobiographical account of surviving the Holocaust.

“That’s always an eye-opening experience for the kids,” Denette said, adding that students learn empathy through studying history.

This past year, Denette added The Hobbit to his curriculum.

“It’s a heck of a fun book to teach,” he said. It’s the last book students read before they leave for the summer, when “they’re thinking about going on adventures.”

Denette’s former students Millennia Williams and Andrew Thompson, both of whom graduated in May from Mayflower High School, said they weren’t surprised about his honor.

“He is the greatest teacher I have ever had,” Thompson said. “I met him in 10th grade, and he was my seventh-period English teacher. Right off the bat, he and I had a really cool connection; he mentored me.

“He was very uplifting and led me more to Christ; it was just really cool. I learned how to be a man,” Thompson said. “In journalism, he helped me with a lot of things, like learning how to use all the technology completely and totally.”

Thompson said he enjoyed the books Denette chose to teach.

“That was one of the things we clicked on; I’ve always loved literature. I learned a lot about his favorite novels, like Catch-22. I learned a lot about Oedipus and The Odyssey,” Thompson said.

Williams said Denette “has a crazy amount of care in his heart and a passion for his job. If anyone deserves to be Mayflower’s Teacher of the Year, it’s definitely this guy.”

She said “teachers aren’t paid to care, but he acted like it was his sole purpose for teaching, and he showed the students that he’s just as human as we are. At lunch, he’d set aside time to play video games like Smash Brothers with us, and let me tell you, he won almost every time.”

Williams said Denette “is the type of teacher to try and make work fun and make light of literature and plays such as Twelfth Night and Macbeth, as dreary as they were, and if you didn’t understand the content, he’d explain it until you did, even if it took longer than expected.”

Denette said he tries not to interrupt the students when they get on a roll talking about a book.

“One of my favorite things to do is what I call a round-table discussion,” Denette said. “I have my students read and come to class with five questions — I tell them, ‘Write me five essay questions, but we’re not going to write essays. We’re going to talk about them.’ I try to encourage them to respond to one another rather than listen to me all the time.

“I like student-driven conversations.”

Because that’s what it’s all about to this Employee of the Year — the students.

Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.

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