Local teacher honored for innovative methods
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ST. IGNATIUS — John Fleming has held many titles — history teacher, state legislator, coach, father, husband, volunteer firefighter and Army veteran, to name a few — and he recently received one more to add to the list. Fleming was named the winner of the 21st Montana Statehood Centennial Bell Award as Montana History Teacher of the Year, but he gives his students the credit.
“It wasn’t me; it was the trip,” he said.
The trip is the Tour of Montana, a four-day, three-night field trip around southwestern Montana, with every detail planned to give Fleming’s 40 eighth-graders maximum exposure to the state’s history. Starting at St. Mary’s Mission in Stevensville, the Tour takes kids through battlefields and caverns to gold mining towns and hot springs. Fifteen years ago, Fleming began the Tour of Montana as an annual reward to his history students for their hard work, and it’s become one of the favorite memories students bring up at graduation.
The Tour offers students an opportunity to see Montana that they sometimes don’t otherwise have, explained Mission High School principal Jason Sargent, who nominated Fleming for the Bell Award.
“It’s one of those educational trips that I think can really influence kids in a positive way,” Sargent said. “What a great experience for our kids … It’s amazing how many kids don’t have the opportunity to get out and experience these (places in Montana).”
Each year, the Tour takes place the week before Memorial Day, and by that time, Fleming’s students are chomping at the bit to hit the road.
“We lead up to the Tour of Montana for almost the whole semester of Montana studies,” Fleming explained. “The kids become experts on each site before they go.”
Fleming assigns three or four of his eighth-graders to each stop on the tour, and the students are tasked with learning about important dates and people, geography of the area, stories and interesting facts about their site. Their research is compiled into a guidebook page for the other students to study during the trip. Each student group also writes, directs and performs an educational skit at its assigned site.
“They do a lot of work,” Fleming said.
The preparations alone are a month’s worth of schoolwork. And then during the trip, students keep journals about what they see and learn, compete for prizes in several scavenger hunts for information around historical sites, play “animal bingo” to keep track of all the wildlife they see and take quizzes on every skit they watch. While junior high kids tend to run through museums, the scavenger hunts are great tools to get them to slow down and absorb information, Fleming explained.
“(The scavenger hunts) help (the students) to get a bite into what they’re doing,” he said.
Fleming holds “circle time” each evening, which he said has a twofold purpose of reviewing what the students learned each day and helping calm the kids before bedtime. The group rises at 6 every morning on the trip, and all four days have full schedules, between traveling, rest stops and historical sites.
“(The schedule) keeps us busy and keeps us going,” Fleming said, joking that, “you can’t make (eighth-graders) tired, but you can try.”
In addition to the schoolwork, the Tour of Montana offers plenty of adventure for the middle-schoolers. Students climb the cliffs at Madison Buffalo Jump State Park and perform skits beside the Gallatin River when it’s overflowing — part of the reason three or four parent chaperones always accompany the group on the trip, for safety’s sake.
“The kids have a good time, and we have a lot of fun, too,” Fleming said. “They talk about it for years.”
After next year’s Tour, they’ll have even more to talk about. Fleming’s classes will take a more in-depth look at the geology of Yellowstone National Park and start to learn about what’s going on under the surface of Montana.
“It’ll add some more science to (the Tour),” he noted.
This fall, Fleming will take another trip with his students, this time to Helena for the Bell Award ceremony at the state capitol on Nov. 8, the 121st anniversary of Montana's statehood. Fleming's prizes are a plaque and $1,250 that will be used to purchase Montana history materials for Fleming’s school library and to defray expenses for the trip to Helena.
And in an intriguing turn of events, Fleming recently learned that the bell for which the Bell Award is named is actually from St. Ignatius. The bell hangs in the rotunda of the State Capitol, and is labeled as being from a church in St. Ignatius. But as a true historian, Fleming dug deeper and learned that the bell didn't come from the Mission Church, but more likely from the Ursuline School that burned down in the early 1970s.
“My suspicion is that it was a bell from the (Ursuline) school,” Fleming said. “I think it’s really neat because it’s our kids, our community and our bell.”
