Lawyers don’t get trophies, but Phillips does

Nationally certified English teacher Caroline Phillips never wanted to be a teacher. Ever.

But that’s what she did.

The daughter of a teacher and a professor, Phillips grew up in Austin, Texas. For a while, Phillips was unsure of what she wanted to do for her career. All she knew was that, because of her familial background in education, she definitely did not want to teach.

“So many people in my family did it, I never, ever wanted to do it,” Phillips said.

After graduating high school in 1967, Phillips attended California State University at Northridge, where she studied rhetoric, the art of debate. Afterwards, she attended and graduated from Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

However, instead of becoming a lawyer after graduation, Phillips took a position at an all-girls Catholic school.

“Lawyers don’t get trophies,” Phillips said. “I was a debater and [my partner and I] got trophies all the time. [Being a lawyer] just didn’t seem like it would be very interesting.”

Phillips’ coaching job at the Catholic school in Los Angeles, however, had nothing to do with sports.

“[The school] hired me to coach the debate team,” Phillips said. “In those days we didn’t have very many woman debaters, so I thought it would be a challenge to go to this all-girls school and turn the students into vicious debaters.”

Shortly after her employment, Phillips found herself enjoying the atmosphere at the school and decided to teach.

“To stay on and make more money, I had to teach more stuff,” Phillips said. “And [the school] wanted all their teachers to have California certification, and they paid for me to do that.”

In the 1980s, Phillips returned to Texas for three or four years to be with her parents. At this time she developed an interest in journalism.

After a second stay in California from 1985 to 1998, Phillips relocated to Chicago, Illinois, and opened an interior design business called Phillips Group, which she ran from 1998 to 2004.

“I have no background in interior design,” Phillips said, “but it was just something that I wanted to do.”

Not long after closing the business, Phillips thought of returning to California. However, when she discovered that she would not be able to get her old job back for the same salary, she decided to stay in Illinois as a teacher. Two years later she moved to Tennessee and has been with Bartlett ever since.

“I moved to Tennessee because of my husband’s job,” Phillips said. “I got interviewed and hired at Bartlett on the same day.”

Here, Phillips teaches junior and senior English and sponsors the Panther Parade yearbook staff. Her students attest both to Phillips’ can-do attitude and to her ability to coax grade A work from her students.

“She practically lets us learn at our own pace,” senior Kiara Johnson, one of Phillips’ English students, said. “We’re doing ‘Macbeth’ now. She explains scenes in words we know so we can understand it.”

Senior yearbook staff member Meghan Hawkins agrees.

“She’s very on-task, and she knows what she wants,” Hawkins said. “She’s like a mother, but she’s also got the teacher attitude. She takes care of us, but she also expects great things from us in return.”

Phillips expects greatness not only from her students, but also from herself. Recently, Phillips received National Teacher Certification.

“National Teacher Certification is the highest designation a teacher can get,” Phillips said.

To qualify, Phillips had to compile a portfolio almost 300 pages in length, analyze the progress made in two of her students’ work, and record two videos of herself teaching one large group and one small group of students.

“I can’t tell you which classes I picked for liability reasons,” Phillips said. “But I can tell you that they were very enthusiastic about helping me and getting recorded.”

In addition to national certification, Phillips also has state certifications in Texas, California, Illinois, and Tennessee.

With a degree from law school and experience in interior design, journalism, and debate, Phillips could probably do just about anything she chose. However, she ultimately decided to teach at Bartlett and “fell in love” with the school. How lucky are we?