Mr. Betcher rolls his bag into class and turns on his water heater. An aroma of tea fills the room as he goes around and asks everyone for their shoutout for the week. After everyone shares, it’s time to read, discuss, but most importantly ask why we exist on this earth. Class ends. Maybe we’ll write an essay tomorrow.
Through stories, art, and shared questions, Mr. Betcher has built a classroom where students learn to think for themselves, shaped by his lifetime of reading and teaching.
Mr. Betcher comes from a long line of teachers. His Grandmother taught middle school English, and his mom ran a daycare center, building a foundation for his later approach to teaching. As a child, Mr. Betcher was an avid reader: books became a persistent presence throughout his life.
“I’m not sure I would’ve survived middle school without reading a lot of books,” said Mr. Betcher.
After high school, Mr. Betcher went on to attend Reed college, where initially, he was undecided.
“I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but had set myself up to either major in religion, history or English, and I chose to go with English ‘cause I thought the things I had said in that class were the smartest things I was saying.”
When Mr. Betcher graduated from Reed in 2005, it took a while for him to step onto the path of teaching. He spent several years in AmeriCorps for a few years to gain real experience, and he worked in schools. Those years made him realize that helping students was something worth pursuing.
After his wife was accepted to law school, he moved east to support her. But to stay afloat financially, he looked for a job, eventually landing a position at the Link Community School as the director of student alumni affairs. There, he ran clubs, went to parent meetings, and supported administrators.
A turning point came when Mr. Betcher was hiking up Haleakalā in Hawaii, and came to a realization.
“I was thinking about what I liked about my job and I was like, well, I like the part where I hang out with the kids… What do I not like? I don’t like the part where I write a bunch of reports,” said Mr. Betcher, “and so when you put it like that, I should probably become a teacher.”
Shortly after, the 2008 financial crisis hit, Mr. Betcher’s position at Link Community School was eliminated. During this time, he started doing pottery, and began applying to jobs as well as grad school. Eventually, pottery turned into a lifelong passion. His colorful ceramic mugs with steaming hot tea remain a persistent sight throughout the halls of BIF.
Pottery serves as an outlet for his creativity that allows for experimentation, and Mr Betcher encourages all students to do things “not 'cause you want to be good at it, but 'cause you want to do a thing and see what happens.”
Eventually, he was accepted to Columbia university, where he learned how to really think, and one of his most prominent mentors there was Maxine Green. Maxine Green had taken many of the ideas that Mr. Betcher had thought about and put them into words— ideas of freedom, collaboration and possibility.
Now, in his teaching, Mr. Betcher designs his english classes around learning how to think deeply, emphasizing process over product.
This philosophy is partially rooted in constructivism, an idea that goes back to his mother’s teaching career. He believes that a teacher's job is not to give answers, rather their role is to help students figure out how to create meaning for themselves.
“At the end of the day, a teacher's job is to make themselves irrelevant like you,” said Mr. Betcher. “My highest hope is that you … will learn how to ask the questions of the books yourself.”
In practice, that belief translates into the way Mr. Betcher structures his classes. Following the teachings of Maxine Green, Mr. Betcher establishes his classroom as a public space, one filled with discussion and exploration.
In his socratic seminars, students form an open forum where ideas can bounce off one another, while in the Author Studies capstone, students are free to choose books that align with their own interest.
Mr. Betcher found his meaning of teaching comes from watching countless students' journeys in becoming thinkers.
“It's a beautiful privilege to be a part of people's growth,” said Mr. Betcher.
In the early years of BASIS, Mr. Betcher joked that you could build a school around the amazing teachers that he deeply respected. It was only after teaching nearly every English class and moving upwards as the school grew, that he realized the irony.
“Oh, they really did build a school around me, didn’t they?”
“I always knew I liked reading books and it just took me a while to figure out how to make a career out of it,” said Mr. Betcher.