Jeremy Hunter, a man of many strengths. From teaching students about the world we live in to helping student athletes find success in the pool, Hunter continues to work to better our Shorewood community.
Hunter began his teaching career at Kellogg Middle School where he worked for three to four years after graduating from the University of Washington in 2002. He started teaching at Shorewood in the 2007-2008 school year. Teaching has always been a passion of Hunter’s and this passion grew in college. “Even in high school I had jobs where I was in a teaching role like I taught ski lessons all through high school, I’ve taught swim lessons and I have always really enjoyed working with kids,” he said. “I get a lot of energy from interacting with kids so it felt like a pretty natural career in a lot of ways.”
In his time at Shorewood, Hunter has taught all types of social studies classes from Civics to World Geography to Ethnic Studies. “I really like teaching Civics. I think it’s a really, really important class for high school seniors to take. It’s fun teaching a senior class, but it is also so relevant and so important right now that we understand how democracy works and how our country works and what those responsibilities look like,” he said. Currently, he is teaching Civics as well as World History, working with seniors and sophomores.
As a history teacher, Hunter uses history to help students better understand the world. “I really think that history in particular is important because it gives us context for the world that we live in today,” he said. “The world today can be really confusing and full of events that maybe are hard to understand and if you have a sense of history then you have a sense of context of what’s happened before and helps you understand the world today.”
By working as a teacher for so many years Hunter has seen a lot of change. “I think that I am a better teacher now in a lot of ways just because the longer you do something, the more experience you get with it, the more you can understand how to do it well,” he said. But he also believes teaching has become even more difficult with the amount of things that kids have gone through and continue to face today. “I think the challenges that kids are going through today are very different then they were like 10 years ago,” he said. “It’s harder to support kids because they’re pulled in so many different directions right now in the world whether it’s through social media or just the pressures of being a teenager today. It’s harder to have students want to listen. There are a lot of things that you are competing with today.”
Hunter tries to support his students as much as he can. “I think that my role as an educator is to try to support students in their growth and try to meet them where they’re at but also try to challenge them to grow and to appreciate that it’s a big world,” he said, “there are lots of ways that you can get involved in it and have a positive impact on it.”
From the classroom to the pool, Hunter is also the head swim coach at Shorewood. He started as an assistant coach in the 2008-2009 school year and has been the head coach of the boys side for eight years and just this year started as head coach of the girls side. Like in teaching, Hunter enjoys seeing the growth from his student athletes throughout the season but in a different environment than in the classroom. “Swim is really fun because there is such improvement and you get to measure that and it is something you get to celebrate and see visibly. It makes it fun,” he said.
Being both a coach and a teacher, Hunter works with young student athletes to get the most out of them in both the classroom and the pool. “Teaching is like coaching in a lot of ways where you try to get to know people and figure out how to support [students] and work towards their success, so in a lot of ways it is similar,” he said. But coaching is also different from teaching as it can help open up new opportunities in young people’s lives. Some people thrive in different environments. “I think it’s different in that the way that you measure success is a little different and also people have different strengths. For a lot of people they take a lot of satisfaction being successful in athletics and it helps build confidence, and skills in a different area of life from academics,” he said. “That can be really helpful to people as they try to navigate life down the road. You learn a lot from athletics.”
In his time at Shorewood, Hunter has done practically everything from coaching swim to teaching multiple different courses. He works with students in the classroom to help them understand the world around them and their place in the world, and he works with student athletes in the pool to help them find success in a different environment. In both places, Hunter works to see growth in his students and help them find a place to be successful in this world. “I really enjoy the challenges of teaching, and every year there are different challenges, but Shorewood is a really fun place to work and I really enjoy the people I work with and the students that come to the classroom.”
