Photo by Lexi Coon.
Brad Waguespack has taught all over the country — it just hasn’t always been in a classroom. Now, he’s Vestavia’s Secondary Teacher of the Year.
Brad Waguespack is not a normal teacher. After graduating from Vestavia Hills High School and from UAB, his life plan didn’t include teaching. But now, he’s Vestavia Hills City School’s Secondary Teacher of the Year.
After growing up in a very outdoors-oriented family, Waguespack decided he wanted to work at Yellowstone National Park the summer following his senior year of high school. He was turned away because of his age, but pointed in the direction of the Student Conservation Association. He was accepted into the program and sent to Montana to work in the Beaver Head National Forest for five weeks.
“To be honest, I was scared to death,” he said. “My family left me in the airport in Butte, Montana, and for five weeks we drove into the trailhead and the backcountry and stayed there.” Scared or not, something in Waguespack must have clicked, because he spent every summer through college working with the SCA and Outward Bound in the northeastern U.S.
Eventually, Waguespack ventured back to attend Montana State for graduate school. “When I was still looking for a research certification, I needed to do student teaching,” he said. Because there were more student teachers than available positions, the school required him to go out of town to teach, and he was placed at the Northern Cheyenne Reservation.
“A lot of big-ticket ideas I had never really thought about, like what’s the value of an education,” Waguespack said, noting that the people in area he was teaching in lived largely in poverty and had an 86 percent unemployment rate. “It made me really think about the value of education and the roles of teachers. I feel like it was a really great place to learn.”
After working on the reservation, Waguespack said he wanted to go back to the Northeast and continued his teaching at an expeditionary school.
“I wasn’t sure I could teach in a traditional public school,” because of his work at the reservation and through Outward Bound, he said.
In 2010, Waguespack came back around to more “traditional” teaching, and returned to Alabama to take a teaching position in Pell City. Three years later, he returned to his old stomping grounds, Vestavia Hills High School, as a teacher.
“The real reason I moved back to Vestavia was because there was an opening in environmental science,” he said.
Now, Waguespack teaches classes in regular and advanced biology and environmental science. He still credits his teaching methods to what he learned from his experiences on the reservation and with Outward Bound.
“I had this very experiential education with Outward Bound, and then I had a really rigid, scientific, heavy-on-content background, and it’s always been about balancing those,” he said. “Anybody can learn a fact, but applying that fact, making sense of that fact, is to me what I want to continue to craft.”
Even with all that Waguespack brings to a classroom, he said he was still surprised to be nominated — and then chosen — as the district’s Secondary Teacher of the Year.
“It’s so nice to hear that your peers think that of you, because there are really great teachers here,” he said. “I’m amazed at the caliber of these educators in the schools.”
