As English teacher Jill Jackl walked into the room for her interview, she introduced herself with a smile on her face.
“I smile a lot, which either students find really refreshing or very off putting,” Jackl said.
Many people ask why Jackl wanted to be a teacher. For Jackl it was a love for teaching. When Jackl was a full time college instructor, her job was replaced by part-time workers.
“I didn’t have the za-za-zooy that I use to have when I was younger, but I still wanted to teach,” Jackl said. “I love what I do; I mean I love it.”
And it isn’t a classroom if you aren’t learning with it.
“I love teaching because we constantly have to keep thinking, and the day I’m not also a student from what I teach is the day I leave the classroom,” Jackl said. “It would be a boring, dull existence.”
Before Jackl became a high school teacher she was a college instructor where she taught at Nickel State University, Thibodaux Louisiana, University of Wyoming and Nash Community College in Rocky Mount. There she had a lot more freedom to the teach things that she wanted to teach. However, Jackl took the “privilege and the honor” to stop working after she had her two daughters.
“That was something I really wanted,” Jackl said. “So I left my career and I stayed home with my daughters. No preschool/daycare. I wanted to raise my children, and that’s a gift these days.”
Eleven years later, when she went to find her old job, it didn’t “exist”. That’s when Jackl got her master’s degree in teaching.
Jackl is also thought highly of by some of the students she’s had. Senior Elizabeth McKnight described Jackl.
“[She’s] eccentric,” McKnight said. “Intelligent doesn’t cover it, so go into thesaurus and find a word that’s like a step over intelligent. Stylish…. [She’s] not a motherly figure, but an authority figure you want with you.”
“I am vivacious,” Jackl said. “I think I’m wise, and in the same breath, [a] student of life.”
It’s a common stereotype that teachers struggle with technology. In Jackl’s eyes, it is a gift, but she also believes that it has made people, not just students, lazy thinkers.
“I have to spend an inordinate amount of time in the classroom trying to teach critical thinking, because technology has made us, and not just students—I’m not finger pointing—lazy,” Jackl said. “it has given us a gift, but it’s a backhanded gift.”
To help limit the mental laziness, in her own home Jackl puts some rules down with her 15 and 13 year old girls.
“That phone goes up at 9:30 every night, save for weekends, and I model that behavior,” Jackl said. “I do not sit and peck my laptop to the wee hours of the night.”
And while she does use her laptop at home and during the day, she never uses it without her arm socks.
“Oh my gosh, her arm socks!” McKnight said. “She apparently doesn’t like the way it’s always too cold or too hot… so she takes old socks and puts them on her arms with the little fingers cut out so that she can continue to type, but so she doesn’t have to feel the computer.”
As far as arm socks go, Jackl’s gotten them as presents and has a backup pair in her desk, but no knitted arm socks or online brand can compare to her favorite pair: a pair of old, grey socks with the toes cut out for slipping her hands through.
Much like her arm socks, Jackl is filled with surprises and interesting stories.
“Life: ‘It’s not the filling of the pail, it’s the lighting of a fire. – W.B. Yeats,’” Jackl said. “It pertains not just to education but the way I live my life. I need my summers off so I can refill and I have something to add to the classroom, to the experience…. Life offers no rehearsals.”
The experience that people hear the most about ‘Jack and Jill’ the motorcyclists.
“We have a nice BMW,” Jackl said. “Large 1200 CC on off road. We do a lot of off road camping. It is a lot of fun…. I don’t ride; I’m passenger, and we are ATGATT (All The Gear All The Time). We’re very safe riders, but we are motorcyclists, so it’s a sport, and we do take it as a sport.”
Jackl and her husband often introduce themselves as Jack and Jill.
“His real name is Andrew, Andy, but his nickname is Jack, and yes that is an absolutely humorous coincidence,” Jackl said. “When we tell people our names Jack and Jill, they’re like, ‘Aw.’ It’s kind of embarrassing, but it’s true.”
But never did Jackl stop giggling about it.
– By Karina Black
