Fortin Turns 'Lights Off' on Teaching Career

FORT KENT, Maine – Students piled into his classroom for the last time on Monday, squinting their eyes to see the wall paintings and crafts that decorate the room. Richard Fortin discovered his high school students learned better with the lights off.

“It was just cozier in the dark…I have this bank of windows in my classroom that give off enough light,” the retiring English teacher said. “I’ve never had kids have to read in the dark, but I do like it darker than I guess most teachers.”

The dim lighting provided just the atmosphere he needed to paint campfire-like scenes for his students, as they circled their desks together and heard tales of knights and chivalry and the black plague. The gray shaggy-haired and bushy-bearded teacher relished every chance he got to captivate seniors with his booming voice as he pounded his fists onto his desk for dramatic climaxes.

“I’ve had more fun doing this than anything I could think of,” Fortin said. “Most of my career, I didn’t understand why they were paying me to do it, it was so much fun.”

Fortin, an avid outdoorsman, plans to do more hunting, fishing and gardening near his six-acre home in Fort Kent with the extra time. He also hopes to spend more time with his wife, Joanne, whom he has been married to for 35 years. She is the Director of Nursing at Northern Maine Medical Center and he said it’s a “really high-pressure job,” so he wants to do everything he can to “make life a little bit easier for her.”

Fortin, 55, spent the last 31 years teaching students in Fort Kent and Van Buren, and encouraging them as they closed their high school careers. And now as he closes his high school teaching career his principal is wondering how he will fill the void.

“I just think kids who haven’t had a chance to have Mr. Fortin will lose out,” Fort Kent Principal Timothy Doak said, “because it’s just, each school has one, each school has a teacher who everybody cherishes and respects and can’t wait to have, and I think Mr. Fortin was that teacher for us.”

Fortin said he taught for as long as he could make it fun for his students. He is retiring now partially because he doesn’t agree with the direction that education is headed in America and it is starting to conflict with his teaching style. Fortin disagrees with No Child Left Behind and other similar policies he believes approach education from the wrong direction.

“Right now, a lot of times you’re governed by the tests that you give rather than the instruction that you give in your classroom,” he said. “To me that’s – I feel like I’m losing the autonomy of my classroom to teach what I want to teach.”

Fortin found success with his bizarre teaching style that encouraged students to design the classroom with their diverse imaginations. Crafts hang from the ceiling. And the walls are filled with various paintings from The Lord of the Rings, Brave New World, 1984 and other books they read.

“When I first got here I really didn’t know Dick (Fortin) that well, and I would walk by his classroom and would kind of find it interesting that he’s in there with the lights off and the room is painted,” Doak said. “But then the more I would do classroom visits and the more I would talk to kids, it just seems like Dick was one of the driving forces behind senior year...And he made it a very special time for our kids.”

It was 31 years of very special for Fortin as well, he said. He cherished each day he spent with his students. And now he’ll miss those students even more. But the classroom art will always stay freshly painted in his memory.

“The memories were always there,” Fortin said. “Every time I looked at my classroom, every time I looked on the wall, I could remember those kids and what we did and why they did it and why they did that particular painting and how much fun they had doing it. And so for me it’s been always really cool coming into my room.”