This year, Friend Select welcomed Anna Gallagher to the History department after five years teaching at an all-girls public high school in New York City and later at a public school in Hudson Valley.
Anna is originally from the Philadelphia area; she and her husband decided to move back to the area after living in New York for several years. “We were going to stay in New York forever,” she explained, “and then we had a baby, and we were like, we miss all of our families. So then we moved back to Philly.”
At Friends Select, Anna is currently teaching 10th grade World History, Psychology in the fall, and Destination Philly in the spring. She is also the faculty advisor for Model UN, a new club, and Board Games Club.
Anna initially came to Friends Select last year as the long-term substitute for History Teacher Dave Marshall, from January to April. “I wasn’t going to go back to teaching yet,” she said. “But I applied for Dave’s fill-in job…and then I loved it…The people were all so nice and welcoming, and it’s a lower stress environment than a lot of other schools I’ve taught in, which means that I don’t take all that stress home, which is really nice.”
Before teaching, Anna worked as an administrator at New York University. She said, “It was a lot of student one-on-one stuff, which I really liked, but I hated that I felt like I wasn’t actually doing anything interesting.”
Anna is very interested in teaching history and has also become interested in teaching psychology. “ I’ve been loving it, I’ve been getting really into it,” she said. “I wasn’t looking forward to teaching it, and then over the summer, I took an online course through Yale, and I’m actually really jazzed…In history, we don’t get to do experiments, and we get to do them in psych, which is my favorite part, science meets history.”
In her classes, Anna emphasizes the importance of personal growth alongside academic success. “I always tell [students] that if you leave my room and you don’t remember an exact ruler, I don’t care,” she said. “But if you leave my room and you still aren’t organized and still overly procrastinate, then I feel like I’ve failed in my job. I’m always emphasizing planning ahead. I use calendars so that they can do that, and the other thing, too, is communicating with me. I just want them to be better students, so that they can leave school and then have fun in their own life and not be stressed constantly.”
She also prefers a tech-free classroom. “I’ve always done no laptops and no tech for all my stuff,” she said. “I taught AP World for a long time, and none of that was take-home essays ’cause everything had to be practiced for the test, where it’s handwritten in front of you during. So a lot of our writing was always in class, which I also liked because I was always able to give feedback immediately.”
Outside of school, Anna has a range of interests, including hiking, birding, reading, and Irish dancing. She jokes, “I have the same hobbies I did when I was nine”.
