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Peabody ranked No. 1 for fourth consecutive year
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Peabody ranked No. 1 for third consecutive year
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Alumni Profiles
Joyce “Anne” Dodson Trower, B.S. ’52, M.A. ’56
Always Time to Help
Anne Trower seems to be a perpetual motion machine when it comes to helping other people. She and fellow church members of the Ladue Chapel Presbyterian Church in St. Louis spent a week in March helping Hurricane Katrina victims in Houma, La. It was her second trip to Houma to rebuild houses virtually destroyed by the devastating hurricane.
The house Trower and members of the team worked on this year required a new roof, new ceilings in all the rooms, new tile and a new tub in the bathroom. They also did a lot of scraping and painting on the outside and pruned shrubs that had overgrown. Both times they were in Houma for a full week. Trower says she got great satisfaction out of the project.
“I think I got more out of it than the people we helped,” she says. “You just feel like you are supposed to help your neighbor. You are supposed to love your neighbor as yourself. My parents taught me early what is right.”
Trower, a native of the small town of Mill Springs in western Kentucky, chose to attend Peabody because of the influence of an aunt who was an alumna.
“Peabody had the program (elementary and junior high education) in which I was interested,” she says. “I went down there and just loved it. I felt very comfortable. I made friends and my instructors were so kind and good. Everything about my years there was wonderful.”
After earning her bachelor’s degree, Trower taught at a grammar school not far from the campus while attending graduate classes at Peabody. She then spent a year teaching Army and Air Force children in a small town near Frankfurt, Germany. After returning to the states, she finished her master’s degree in education at Peabody and taught for many years in University City, a St. Louis suburb, where she also met her late husband, Willard Trower.
While a graduate student at Peabody, the college provided a scholarship for her to spend a summer at Harvard taking two education courses. Trower is now giving back to Peabody by establishing a $160,000 charitable gift annuity toward graduate scholarships and has also left Peabody in her will.
“I wanted to do something for the school that had been good to me, and I also wanted to do something for somebody who wants to go to school, but doesn’t have the funds,” she says. “I thought this might be a good way to use money in a productive way. I also get some income. It’s a good investment.”
Susanne Frensley, M.Ed. ‘94 and Christian Sawyer, M.Ed. ‘02
Dynamic Duo
Hillsboro High School teachers Susanne Frensley and Christian Sawyer both realized they had a knack for teaching as a result of their experiences as volunteer tutors.
Frensley grew up in the affluent town of Bronxville, just north of New York City. A local parent had a connection with a church in East Harlem. “Twice a week, she would take a station wagon full of students into East Harlem to a church that had formed a partnership with a middle school in the neighborhood,” Frensley recalls. “We were a resource for students to get their homework done and ask questions.
Over the course of four years, I had three students I worked with and to whom I felt very connected.”
Sawyer’s first experience tutoring was to help a friend who had failed most of his high school classes and wanted to join the Air Force. A big sticking point was that he first had to pass the Air Force entrance exam.
“He didn’t go to my school but I worked with him nearly every weekend for several months,” Sawyer recalls. “When he passed the Air Force entrance exam, I thought, ‘Wow! That’s something that really made a difference.’”
Both Frensley and Sawyer have been honored far beyond the norm for their teaching excellence.
Frensley was honored as the Tennessee Teacher of the Year for 2007 and is only the fourth Metro Nashville Schools teacher named in the 46-year history of the award. She and other state winners were honored by President Bush in an April White House Rose Garden ceremony.
She teaches Advanced Placement (AP) Art History, Art Survey and World Geography. For the last 10 years, about 90 percent of her students have passed the AP Art History exam. She works extremely hard to recruit non-traditional AP students. “We have a 40 percent Caucasian, 40 percent African American and 20 percent mixed population at Hillsboro,” she says. “I think it’s really important that our AP classes come as close as possible to reflecting those percentages.”
Sawyer was named by the National Council for the Social Studies as one of two national winners of the 2006 Outstanding Secondary Social Studies Teacher of the Year award. He was also named as the 2006 Tennessee Outstanding Secondary Social Studies Teacher of the Year. Sawyer teaches AP European history, AP Human Geography, and English.
Sawyer’s enthusiasm is evident in his eyes, students say. “They tell me I have crazy eyes,” Sawyer says with a laugh. “They say, ‘When we get the answer right, your eyes go crazy.’ ”