Every high school student wants a “cool” nickname, but AP US History and AP Research teacher Caroline Blanchard takes pride in her comical high school nickname, “Documentary Blanchard”. From America’s castles to the mansions from the Gilded Age, this history buff spent her high school free time intently watching and sharing facts with her peers from the History Channel.
“Like, the fire drill the other day, I was saying to somebody walking next to me, you will learn why we have fire drills and fire doors because of this event that happened 100 years ago,” Blanchard said.
Born and raised in Illinois, a taste of Blanchard’s midwestern accent sometimes comes out in her class lectures or her casual conversations with students and other teachers. Growing up with divorced parents and a father overseas, she traveled and visited him often. Her father was a history major and inspired her to follow in his footsteps by also majoring in history.
She attended the University of Illinois and graduated with high honors. Afterward, she went to graduate school at the University of Chicago. She moved to New Jersey after graduating and started off her career working at a bank. She got licensed as a broker, but being a woman in brokerage was not as lucrative as she had hoped for, most of her job being paperwork. The final straw that caused her to resign from her job was when her coworker had a heart attack, which she saw as a sign to switch career choices.
“I was like, well, nobody’s dying at their desks in history offices, at least that we know,” Blanchard said. “That’s a symbolic moment when you see the gurney going through the office, you know?”
She first got her feet in education as a tutor in Livingston. She successfully tutored many students and even a few of them were the valedictorians of their respective graduating classes. West Essex was her first formal teaching job and she was hired specifically for her experience with test prep. She treats every year of teaching as a new puzzle to solve. “It is sometimes like Groundhog’s Day and every year you get a new set of kids, and it’s they have new strengths and weaknesses, but that’s fun,” Blanchard said. “It’s like a constant challenge, and you can’t just roll out the same thing every year.”
Throughout her 15 years at West Essex, she has taught a variety of classes, such as AP Research, Genocide and Holocaust, American Film, Modern American History, Honors US 2 and APUSH 1 and 2. She hopes students would call her teaching style laid back and interactive. She wants them to laugh at her sarcasm and take note of her empathy.
She believes everything she teaches is relevant to today’s age in politics and the formation of laws. Specifically, she thinks that history helps her students empathize with people’s stories from the past who are completely different from them.
“You didn’t just fall out of a coconut tree,” Blanchard said. “You are the product of everything that has happened and come before you.”
Aside from her academic career at West Essex, Blanchard and her eight-year-old daughter, Charlotte, often adventure to a national history museum. This history buff also has a quirk for musical theater. She and Charlotte also spend time together seeing Broadway shows.
110 books later, this bookworm almost went through with a career in English. She is obsessed with reading, especially European history books.
Blanchard is proud of her successful career. She has been the NHS teacher of the year at West Essex twice, the 2022 history teacher of the year for NJ and started the Women’s Empowerment Club. She wants her students to remember that teachers also have personal lives and need to balance them.
“We are humans, we are valuable,” Blanchard said.
