Nobleboro Central School teacher Ken Williams sits behind his desk in his classroom in the junior high wing of the school. Williams, who will retire at the end of the school year, said he especially enjoyed working in this classroom, which spacious and naturally lit, thanks to large windows. (Sherwood Olin photo)
Ken Williams does not sound like a man on the brink of retirement.
After a 40-year teaching career, all of it dedicated to Nobleboro Central School, Williams’ final contract concludes with the last day of school, Friday, June 13. Even as he finishes out his final term, he remains as excited about teaching and learning as ever.
“A whole bunch of people have said to me … go out when you like it,” he said. “Don’t go out when you’re mad at it or you don’t like it anymore. If you have your years in and you can afford to do it, then go out when you’re liking it; not when you don’t.”
At the same time, he acknowledged, it could be said he is getting out just in time.
“If I stayed next year, I’d have a grandkid of one of my first students,” he said. “So I’m leaving before I get the grandkid. That’s enough.”
Still, the prospect of leaving the only full-time position he has held since 1985 has left Williams with mixed feelings. He began his career in 1985, fresh out of graduate school, with few possessions and fewer responsibilities. Forty years later, the married father of three retires as one of the school’s longest-tenured faculty member.
“The word I come up with is weird,” he said. “It’s just weird. There’s no word that I can find that is any headier, any more dictionary worthy, or anything. It’s just weird, because I’ve been driving into that parking lot for 40 years. I started working here when I was 26, 27. You know, no children, no house. Anyway, the whole thing – it’s weird.”
In the immediate future, AntiquesWilliams said there is a bucket list of backpacking adventures he and a friend have in mind. He hasn’t ruled doing some substitute teaching down the road. In a couple years, when his wife Barbara eventually joins him retirement, the couple has a list of things they would like to do together.
Ken and Barbara Williams grew up living about 300 yards from each other in Springfield, Penn., although they did not meet until introduced by friends while attending separate colleges around 1980. They married in September 1984, just before Barbara Williams began graduate school.
Today Ken Williams said he doesn’t know quite why the couple chose to make their home in Maine, but it was an easy and obvious decision. They had already seen quite a bit of the America before they first came to Maine, swinging through on a road trip just before moving to Long Island for graduate school.
“We had lobster on some wharf somewhere,” Williams said. “No idea where that was, and we kind of looked at each other and said, ‘OK, we like this. Let’s find our way here.’”
After completing his master’s degree in 1985, Williams moved to Maine to look for work while Barbara Williams remained in New York finishing her graduate degree. That summer Ken Williams lived in a tent and went door to door, school to school, resume in hand looking for a job. He was camping in the Boothbay area when he stopped into Nobleboro Central School. His timing was excellent, as he crossed paths with a teacher with a decade’s worth of experience in Nobleboro who was on his way out.
“I got all dressed up; walked into Nobleboro School the day Mike Denniston was leaving to go to work in Kennebunk,” Williams said. “I walked in the door and he was like, ‘Oh, you’re looking for a job? I’m leaving.’ He said, ‘Let me go take you into town. We’ll get a haircut,’ because my hair was long. I interviewed for the job. A day or two later, they hired me.”
Barbara Williams joined her husband in Maine the following year. The couple built a home in Damariscotta and raised three children – twins Patrick and Katie and Thomas.
Ken Williams agreed that the schools he attended growing are a world away from the small rural school he made his living working in, but it is no accident he made the choices he did. Small schools like NCS make it possible to establish real relationships between teachers and students as well as between the school and the community it serves, he said.
In larger settings, students can get lost in the shuffle. At Nobleboro Central School, like many Lincoln Country schools, the teachers not only know the students by name, they likely taught the siblings and probably know the parents as well.
“My high school graduating class was 450 and I wouldn’t trade the K-8 for the world,” Williams said. “K-8 schools are the places where miracles happen. It’s where the relationships get built.”
Williams cited two life-altering experiences among the many fruits of such relationships.
One former student, Seth Campbell, now an associate professor at the University of Maine and the director of research for the Juneau Icefield Research Program, collaborated with Williams on a grant writing effort that funded a study on Alaska’s 20,308-foot-high Mount Denali in 2013.
“He took me up the west buttress of Denali,” Williams said, adding he climbed to about 14,000 feet. “We wrote a grant, and I was part of a team that acclimatized with his research group, up the glacier on fixed rope teams. (It was) just life changing, just absolutely life changing.”
In a July 31, 2008 article for The Lincoln County News, Campbell specifically cited Williams’ influence for Campbell’s science and climbing career.
More recently, another former student, Justin Dunphy, invited Williams to go fishing with him, after Williams casually expressed an interest. A commercial fisherman, Dunphy fishes offshore for lobster, going out 200 miles or more in nine-day trips. Williams, who was just supposed to ride along, was pressed into service when one of the crew members didn’t show for departure.
“There were supposed to be five, me and the four crew … They were like, ‘All right, we’re going, Williams, you’re going,’ so I was the bait guy,” Williams said.
There were breaks while the boat changed position, but when the boat was hauling traps, Williams’ job was to bait the traps. He said he worked feverishly, determined not to be the new guy who slowed everyone else down. The trip ended up hauling in 20,000 pounds of lobster.
“It was nuts, just nuts,” said Williams said. “My takeaway from that is this: nobody’s allowed to complain about the price of seafood.”
Both Campbell and Dunphy were veterans of the wilderness backpacking trips Williams led for members of the eighth grade class toward the end of every school year. Revamping an idea he inherited from former NCS Principal Wilder Hunt, Williams led students on such camping trips for more than 30 years.
“It got to the point where I had former students coming back to chaperone their kids on the trip,” Williams said. “The reason I stopped doing is because I started worrying more about me than the kids.”
Williams said he believes it is harder to reach kids now than it was the beginning of his career. He cited the prevalence of technology and social media as factors adding pressure to kid’s lives today.
Williams credited his fellow staff members for their consistency in enforcing the culture of politeness and respect. Phones, hats, hoods, and sunglasses are discouraged in school and common courtesies like saying “please” and “thank you” are encouraged. The staff collectively tries to minimize screen time.
“I think we’ve been able to build this as a place that’s a safe place with appropriate expectations,” Williams said. “We try and hold kids accountable. If they mess up, we hold them accountable and if there are good things happening, we celebrate.”
Offering one word of advice for newer educators, Williams strongly encouraged younger professionals to embrace something not connected to the classroom. For 37 years, Williams was active in the teacher’s union, serving as local bargaining unit president and serving on the board of the union’s health insurance trust for 20 years.
“It’s fascinating work, but has nothing to do with the kids that I work with,” he said. “It’s completely different, a completely different arena. I would always joke like, I go to the adult world, but I can’t wait to leave because I want to go back to the classroom.”
