It’s pronounced BEERgit, not BurGEET: Enchanté, Madame Birgit Heimann

Across the screen and miles away, I learned about her path to becoming a teacher which Heimann notes, “felt at first like it was very difficult.” She later adds, “I was in the right place at the right time… all of a sudden it just worked.”

Madame Heimann had always looked forward to the active parts of her dream careers: “standing at an operating table, standing in a courtroom, standing in a classroom, [and] running around on a film/theater set.” In a way, she grew up teaching: oldest of three, Heimann has been teaching since she was three years old! Throughout high school, she had imagined herself working in many different fields yet “by the time I went to college,” she said, “ I had no clear idea of what I wanted to do.” Heimann was certain about one thing, however. She “wanted to become fluent in French and study abroad [in France].”

Heimann’s love for the French language began in elementary school and flourished in the eighth grade. At home, she already spoke English and German before trying to learn other languages. Heimann explained, “[languages] came really easily to me… probably because I already spoke another language [German], probably partly because I have a logical mind— like my dad is really gifted for languages— and I think I kind of inherited that.”

Contemplating her future during her early months of college, she asked herself, “How can I make this easy on myself?” and ultimately decided, “I could make French my major… if I’m gonna teach, I guess I’ll teach that.” The choice to follow the path of least resistance made sense— she would not have had to study “six things” that were of little interest to her. Most importantly, she thought being a teacher would be interesting and fun. It was, she said, “something I could do.”

For those wondering how she taught at that tender age of three, I too was caught off guard. Having younger siblings that can fall for one’s antics does have its perks! “I gave them [her younger siblings] each a composition book and gave them spelling exercises and math problems to do— and then I gave them stickers if they did well,” she explained to me. “I'm not sure they were very willing participants in this game,” she added skeptically, “but they did it— for a while anyway.” There was a brief moment of an awkward silence, as with any virtual meeting, and she looked down while piecing together the following words in her mind: “I guess teaching has always been in me, it just took me a while to realize that.”

As an older sibling myself, I was excited to hear her younger siblings’ perspective of her teaching. I contacted her younger sister, Anina Heimann, one sunny Saturday afternoon. Five years apart, and the youngest of the Heimann siblings, Anina currently works “for the City of Philadelphia in the tax/law part of the Revenue Department… a 9-5 desk job— the opposite of teaching.” Quite young when Madame started “teaching” her, the memories of Heimann’s lessons weren’t as vivid to Anina who wrote, “from what I remember, we did a little of everything.” She later notes, “I think I was very resistant to all of the teaching she tried to inflict upon us.”

Heimann taught her younger siblings more than just academics. In fact, the non-academic portion of her teaching was more memorable in her sister’s eyes since she “certainly didn't want more of it [school work] at home.” “I most remember her teaching me how to ride a bike,” Anina wrote, “I was already 9 and I had no interest in learning how to, but she made me.” She added, “I was definitely the annoying little sister… I'm pretty sure she made me learn how to ride a bike just so I didn't depend on her for all transportation… now we get along better and she doesn't try to ditch me for the most part.”

Thinking back to her days as a student, Heimann said to me, “I also remembered my teachers better than pretty much anyone else in my life— outside of my family.” She still kept in contact with her high school French teacher— Madame Mulherin— who taught grades “7 (sampler year), 9 (French 2), 11 (French 4), and 12 (French 5),” and later “taught AP French at the request of students from the class of 1996.” Heimann said, “I had Madame Mulherin for [four] years, including for AP French… she certainly motivated me to learn the language. I remember her class being wonderful.” Eager to reach out to her, I asked Heimann for her contact information. I received an email from her one evening in which she wrote, “On m'a interviewée aussi pour ‘Voices’ quand j'étais prof de français à Masterman. Quelle coïncidence! [They interviewed me too for ‘Voices’ when I was a French Teacher at Masterman. What a coincidence!]” Mulherin was also “the sponsor of the High School French Club, co-sponsor of Allies, [and] the piano accompanist to the middle school and high school choirs (The Mastersingers) so [Mme Mulherin] knew her [Mme Heimann] as a valued member of the alto section too.” Mulherin wrote, “It always makes a teacher proud when students decide to choose the teaching profession and especially when they decide to teach a subject that he/she has loved teaching. I was thrilled when she contacted me to tell me that she would be teaching at Masterman.”

“I thought that if I could be remembered in the same way by some people, that would feel like success to me,” Heimann wrote in a subsequent email. Reading this made me feel a kind of responsibility— where in the deepest part of my heart, I knew I had to help her achieve this.

As a new teacher, teaching virtually at a new school, with an unfamiliar student body and staff, she explained her experience so far as “weird but good.” Although virtual school was a new experience for Heimann, the Masterman environment wasn’t completely unknown to her. She said, “I really enjoyed getting to know the students that I’ve been getting to know… it's been fun also seeing the teachers who taught me.” Some of those familiar names and faces include Mr. Steve Gilligan, Mr. Louis Borda, and Mr. Tim Roache.

A Masterman alum who enjoys reading (and rereading) Harry Potter, Heimann was once one of us! She quickly added, “I’ve read that in English, French, and German,” brushing it off as if reading books in different languages alone wasn’t an amazing feat. As someone who is currently attempting to read Harry Potter and the Cursed Child in French, I was astonished.

I was curious about her involvement in Masterman regarding extracurricular activities and after she mentioned that her Mr. Sainclair was her “brother’s [Nicholas’s] Cross Country coach.” I interjected with, “and— did you play any sports?” A smile bloomed on her face and she started laughing those short nervous bursts of laughter that escape people’s lips when they hear something absolutely absurd. “NO… no… my sport was Mock Trial!” she exclaimed in between giggles. “I also did stage crew and I was on choir,” she added,“ I think I did choir for all four years of high school, stage crew for three, and mock trial for two, and I really liked all of those.”

She “studied in Lyon for a year” and after attending college at the University of Pennsylvania, she “wanted to see what it was like to live in Germany,” so decided to spend a year in Germany as an “au pair”: a person from a foreign country who lives with a host family and aids with household activities. After her time abroad she tells me, “I applied to Teach For America (TFA) and didn't get in, so I applied to a program to be an English teaching assistant in France.” “Through that program” she continues, “I ended up living in Lyon for another seven months while I worked in a lycée [highschool] in the suburbs of Lyon.” Sadly, after that seven month period, she “applied to TFA again,” but did not get in. But there is a silver lining surrounding every difficulty; she came back to the United States “with the hopes of finding a teaching job somewhere.”

Without a certain path to follow, one might think that Heiman would question her future which rested on unsteady hands. I asked Anina for her perspective of Heimann during this time. Even though Anina “was away at college for most of the time,” she said, “I don't recall her being very worried. I think she was excited and ready to move on and start teaching when she got her first opportunity… but [she was] not particularly stressed in the interim.”

Not long after she arrived back on United States soil, “a job as a receptionist at a small real estate company in Chestnut Hill sort of fell in my lap… I took that as a stopgap while I continued to look for teaching jobs,” she told me. As I processed everything during our meeting, I was able to take in a perspective of her character— persevering, optimistic, grounded, unchanging. She continued to explain, “after nine months there, a school in Wilmington asked me to sub for the rest of the year in three French classes… two weeks into that, in early April 2010, I interviewed for a full-time job at Baldwin— an all-girls school in Bryn Mawr— and got that job, to start that September [2010].” According to her sister who was living in Germany at the time, Heimann “was very excited when she got her job there. A French teaching job is niche enough, and then it was also exactly the age group she wanted to teach. She was thrilled.” At Baldwin, Heimann “taught French in the Middle (Junior High) School [and] was also the 6th Grade Dean.” Similarly to her current position as Masterman’s SGA sponsor, there, she was “a member of the Faculty Board for the Middle School Student Senate.”

These past few weeks, with hours and hours of screen time from seven to eight 40-minute classes and homework assignments, Heimann noticed the many students with blue-light glasses. When I asked her how zoom and virtual school had worked for her, without a second thought, she exclaimed, “it’s a lot of screen time!” Ironically, we met on zoom and spent our lunch time in front of our computers that Wednesday, just to add to the screen time. “I’m glad that we’re using zoom because my computer refuses to work on Google Meets,” she said. On the first day of school, September 2nd, when we hadn’t yet switched to zoom, she told us about the problems she’d had with Google Meet. “I was switching back and forth between two computers and I didn’t even have video for one of my classes because it didn’t work” she told me as she threw up her hands in frustration.“It also makes my computer run really hot,”she added.

As much as we yearn to go back into the building, Heimann made a fair point: “it's tricky, but I feel like it's [virtual school’s] the right thing at the moment,” she explained slowly with an air of understanding. “I do really miss a lot of things about in person teaching. I miss having students just— talk randomly. Like as they’re walking into the class, as they’re walking out of the class, IN THE MIDDLE OF CLASS … even if they’re not doing what they’re supposed to be doing.”

She’d been teaching virtually for about three weeks when I interviewed her and she exclaimed, “something happens in every class usually to make me feel like YEAH, that went well!” She quickly added, “It's not always the entire class— sometimes it's two minutes out of the entire class but hey, I’ll run on those two minutes for a while!” She thought for a couple seconds and stated flatly, “it's really just all the screen time. I'm just like, can I— can I stop?”

I, along with a couple of friends,started to ask other teachers about their lives after highschool and their choice to become teachers. Heimann’s story is not so far-fetched, yet no teacher shares the same story. One of the teachers we interviewed said,“I wish [the students] knew how hard it is for us” when we asked her what she wished students knew about teaching as a career. Being remembered and appreciated is the hope of many— if not all— teachers.

“Teachers who inspired me were ones who were really excited.”

Following Heimann’s interview, I was extremely enthusiastic to speak to her “teacher idol,” who Heimann spoke so admiringly about. “I wanna be like Dr. Dorfman!,” Heimann exclaimed. “[Her students] loved her… they really felt valued in her class— so they showed that right back to her. She was a great teacher! She would walk into a room and the kids would just get quiet… it wasn't that they would get quiet because they were like ‘oh you’re gonna give me a detention’ it was just ‘oh we have to follow the rules for you.’” She later admits, “You know I WANT THAT! I wanna walk into a room and have the kids be like ‘we will now pay attention!’ It hasn’t happened yet— but ONE day.”

As the story goes on, she admitted, “I am glad that I am doing online classes.” She believed that seeing the students’ faces and jumping into breakout rooms had provided her with a better student to teacher relationship. School “would be less personal if we were in the building.” With social distancing guidelines to abide by, “everyone would be wearing masks… I wouldn't be able to get close to anyone” she adds, “even this one on one conversation would be trickier.” Learning students’ names would also be trickier, and she had made it her mission to “pronounce students' names correctly.” On the very first day of school, she told her classes the story of her teacher who called her Bur-GEET instead of BEER-git for about six years. I couldn’t remember the details so I asked her to write about it in an email to which she happily obliged. Heimann wrote, “I had a teacher (no longer at Masterman) who called me ‘bur-GEET’ consistently, starting when I met him in sixth grade. When I corrected him at some point in twelfth grade and said it's pronounced "BEER-git", he said, ‘But I've called you burGEET for six years!" As with all people like myself who have difficult names, they are often mispronounced and misspelled. “There have been a lot of people who mispronounce or misspell my name” she said, “and even people who have told me they ‘fixed it’ [her name] for me.”

“I do appreciate that at least I get to maybe have more interaction right now… and I also get to see— or enable more interaction among my students.” She explained, “With breakout rooms it's easy for me to say ‘go do group work’ but if we were in a classroom, there would be no group work because you wouldn’t be able to get within six feet of each other— you know depending on which classroom you are in.” With a nervous laugh she noted, “room 210 [213] would be pretty tight.” “It would be like what school used to be— which is like everybody’s in straight rows facing forward and then that's it. And the teacher talks. And that's it!”

Heimann continued to explain, “every now and then in class, there would be a student— and I’m talking, like I would be in the middle of a sentence and the student goes”: Heimann acted out a silent outburst of laughter to mimic that of a muted student on zoom who’s laughing hysterically. “That's definitely not a reaction to me,” she stated accusingly with an air of sarcasm. While in French class one day, I received Anina’s responses to my questions. As I read them, I was brought close to laughter several times. When I approached the final question which read, “if you remember any funny/ memorable stories that might be related or unrelated to the article, please write about them!,”Anina had written, “Very unrelated: when I was about 6, my brother and sister were play fighting. I was on my brother's side that day, and probably just wanted to include myself, so I tried to tie up my sister's feet with a lasso my brother had. She was busy fighting with him so she was just kicking her feet around and got me right in the face, knocking out three of my top front teeth that were not at all loose. It took months for them to grow in since the adult ones weren't ready yet.” Remembering Heimann’s words from the interview about students laughing during zooms, I managed to strap on my poker face. As if that bit wasn’t enough, her side note made me completely lose my cool and composed expression. Anina explained, “It's more fun to say ‘my sister kicked my teeth out’ but I figure context is good for a work-related publication.”

During classes, she often spoke about her dog named Schnitzel! I asked her about her favorite animal and though her “favorite domestic animal is a dog”, to my surprise, she revealed, “my favorite animal just for looking at is a giraffe… they are awesome” she adds, “they look so weird!” After Heimann and I talked about our adoration for giraffes, she jumped a little as she realized something. Eager to find out what it was that she was searching for, I leaned forward to try to catch a glance of the item; it dawned on me that screens and web cameras don’t allow for peering over. About two seconds later she held up a card before her computer. Coincidentally, it was a blue card with a silhouette of a giraffe. “I just got this birthday card from a friend of mine— it’s [the giraffe’s] smiling!,” she said grinning from ear to ear. Her birthday was September 5th— it reminded me of her favorite season. Most people favor the season of their birthdays and this little connection made me ecstatic!

Heimann had told me about Harry Potter, her “go-to repeat book,” but she doesn’t “always repeat books.” She said, “another book that I’ve liked a lot in the last few years was The Night Circus. That author [Erin Morgenstem] has a new book out so I’m hoping to buy her new book.” Perhaps that would make a nice birthday gift— for next year.

I asked one of her colleagues about her teaching style and her energy both in and out of the classroom to which I received a “je ne connais pas encore bien Mme. HEIMANN. Comme nous ne sommes pas à l'école tous les jours, mes conversations avec elle restent très limitées [I don’t know Madame Heimann well yet. As we are not in school everyday, my conversations with her have been very limited].” This stumped me as I realized that virtual school presented a chance to build student to teacher relationships but little time for teacher to teacher relationships. I had received student responses however. One sophomore wrote, “she tries to engage the class… she just really understands her students and I can tell [she] will be one of my favorite teachers.” With little teacher to teacher interactions during virtual school, I resorted to asking one of her old teacher colleagues from The Baldwin School. Coincidentally, this contact was also her teacher idol, Dr. Susan Dorfman! “Teaching was a second career for [Dr. Dorfman].” Before teaching all levels of various sciences at Baldwin for twenty-six years, Dorfman “spent three years as a research technician in a neurology laboratory and then almost five years earning a Ph.D. in developmental neurobiology… [she] trained technicians, research fellows at the college, graduate, and postgraduate levels. [She] also taught Gross Anatomy for UPENN’s Dental School.” Dorfman’s email read, “I observed Mme Heimann’s teaching style as a passerby to the open door of her classroom. Although I never visited her classroom in session, I substituted for her and could judge her style by the conduct and expectations of her students.” She explained, “Mme Heimann managed an organized classroom with clear parameters for student-student and student-teacher interactions. She maintained a classroom and hallway atmosphere of mutual respect. She was opened to her students’ suggestions and concerns, friendly, and professional.”

“I was worried that she would be strict or would have high expectations for us,” a sophomore wrote to me. When Madame Copeland retired, the current sophomores never experienced Copeland’s way of teaching— the current juniors were the last class to have Copeland as a teacher. One junior wrote, “I think I became comfortable with Madame Copeland's way of strict teaching so it was surprising to shift my learning mentality again… I think I'll better understand and learn French in a less constricting environment.”

Most if not all heavy decisions require the blessings of parents. As someone who shares a tight bond with her parents, when Heimann told her parents that she wished to pursue a career in teaching, her parents “were like, oh! That makes sense, you’ve been teaching since you were three!” I asked her sister something similar out of curiosity. I had asked, “what was your reaction when your sister said that she wanted to become a teacher?” Anina essentially said the same thing as her parents with one little variance. “I can't say I remember,” she wrote, “but probably something along the lines of ‘well that makes sense considering how much you tortured us with learning when we were little.’”

“If I could be remembered in the same way by some people, that would feel like success to me.” In the little time that we the students have known her and spent with her, memories of her classes have already made an impression on us. Yes, her start was a rocky and nebulous one, but there is a certain lucidity in her future that we will all continue to build!

“Toi et tes camarades de classe, vous avez de la chance d'avoir Mme Heimann comme prof. Elle est fantastique! [You and your classmates, you are lucky to have Mme Heiman as a teacher. She is fantastic!]” Mme Mulherin wrote to me. I don’t doubt that.