Maggie Owen, Reporter
@mowencourant
Teachers come into the education field for many reasons, but for history teacher Marianne Cohen, it was her success on the field that served as an inspiration to become a teacher. Whether she is working with athletes or is in the classroom, Ms. Cohen’s dedication, patience, and love for her students has benefited many members of the New Canaan High School community through the years.
As a child, Ms. Cohen grew up on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in Wolf Point, Montana. There, she had a few teachers who treated her and her classmates equally despite their diverse backgrounds and inspired them to push themselves. “I had some good teachers who were pretty color blind to the students, they really wanted to give us the opportunity to grow,” she said.
With the support of her teachers and her own motivation, Ms. Cohen attended the prestigious Ivy League, Dartmouth College. When she first graduated, becoming a teacher wasn’t on Ms. Cohen’s radar. She assumed that she would go into a career that she could bring back to her community. “I really didn’t think about being a teacher at first, I wanted to go into law or do something to help the Native American cause,” she said.
Having always been an athlete, Ms. Cohen started coaching volleyball and track and field in Stamford. Soon she realized that her passion for helping kids understand concepts in sports could also be effective in the classroom. “I really liked explaining the fundamentals of the game and noticed how the kids learned from me, so I went back to school to get my teaching degree,” Ms. Cohen said.
Since she started teaching history 14 years ago, Ms. Cohen has strived to teach her students not just about the past, but also about themselves. “I want to push students to do better, to stretch as far as they can go, to find strengths and weaknesses and to work on them,” she said.
One of the biggest challenges of teaching that Ms. Cohen has is balancing her time between lesson planning, grading, and actually teaching. “There is not enough time in the day to do everything that I need to do to make sure that the class is ready for the next day, so I find myself up very late at night correcting or making sure that the lesson plan is tweaked just the right way,” she said.
Ms. Cohen often teaches with PowerPoints and lectures, engaging the class with relevant images and connections to her own experiences. “She makes power points that are very helpful and she ties in her own experience which is an interesting addition to the class,” said junior Michael Talamo. “As long as you listen to her lectures, you will have a good time in her class.”
Even Ms. Cohen’s long time friend and colleague, Coach Brown, enjoys listening to her lectures. “I come in to her and sit to listen to her sometimes. I enjoy her classes,” he said.
Ms. Cohen does lectures in class to prepare her students for success in college lecture classes, but she also varies her curriculum to keep students busy. “I think that my teaching style is a little old school mixed with the new. There is always that stand and deliver, a lot of lecture, and I think there is a place for that in teaching because when you get to college there’s going to be courses with a teacher teaching like that,” Ms. Cohen said. “But I also like to get students to teach themselves or to teach each other and to take what they know and apply it to new things.”
According to Ms. Cohen, the most rewarding aspect of her career is the success that her students achieve later in life. “When they do extraordinary things, knowing that I had one very very small piece of that process, makes me really proud to have been a part of their journey,” Ms. Cohen said.
Whether she is on the field or in the classroom, Ms. Cohen goes above and beyond to help her students learn how to be the best they can be. “She is one of the best coaches and best teachers, but more importantly, an unbelievable person,” Coach Brown said.
