The newly-named 2024-2025 Arizona Teacher of the Year almost wasn’t a teacher at all.
Emmett Burnton, an AP World History teacher at Boulder Creek High School in the Deer Valley Unified School District, says he was not someone who grew up wanting to be in the classroom.
Burnton joined The Show to discuss.
Full conversation
EMMETT BURNTON: No no no no. I was pretty mediocre as a student. I think I was suspended in the fifth grade for fighting. And then that would continue until like the seventh and eighth grade, where I had conversations with the administrators being like, “if you keep acting this way, you will not graduate,” type of conversations, where the teachers, they wanted to make that connection, and a lot of them advocated for me. But you know when it's like you're speaking on a different wavelength? It's just not quite right.
And then, that carried throughout middle school and even throughout high school. My 8th grade teacher would write report cards. That doesn't happen anymore, but back in the day they could write maybe like a sentence or two. And mine was always like, “does not apply himself.”
And then even high school, all gen-ed, all my siblings were very much studious. They were these students who had 4-plus GPA, honors and AP and I'm just kind of coasting throughout gen-ed. So in no way did I even really want to be a teacher as a student.
MARK BRODIE: So what changed then? Because obviously at some point you decided this was something you wanted to do?
BURNTON: Actually, it was a lie. We were in my mom's car and my siblings had asked my twin sister what she wanted to do, and she said journalism and film because my older brother was journalism. And she kind of got a little bit of flack for it. And so I wanted to go into film, something with film and I was like, “Oh, gosh, I don't want to get eviscerated for this.”
So, I just picked a profession that I thought sounded noble that people would kind of be like, “Oh, yeah, go for it.” And they did, they responded exactly as I wanted them to. And then in college, now “You lied, you have to follow through with it.” And then college hit, and my professors at NAU — I don't know if it's because my frontal lobe was finally developed or they just said things the right way, but as I was reading in college, or as I was making connections with friends out of the classroom, I was surrounded with just this totally different community who showed me about whether it's like philosophy, the enlightenment and things like that.
And I had this epiphany of agency, like, “Oh my gosh, I do matter.” Kind of like when your teachers are telling you, “get out and vote,” and it doesn't really hit students. That freshman year it finally did, and I was like, “I want to make sure that a student never gets left by the wayside or on this island that I was.”
And so, that pushes me in the classroom like every day to make sure that I can reach those kids and make them have conversations at 16, that I didn't have until I was like 20 or 22, and things like that.
BRODIE: Yeah. So how do you do that? Because obviously it sounds like you had teachers when you were in, in middle school and high school who were trying to do that for you, but it wasn't terribly effective. So maybe what lessons do you take from those? And how do you try to maybe adjust them so that you can be effective?
BURNTON: The big thing that I do is I really try and bring it down every single day back to, “Where do I fit into this conversation?” When we're talking about, whether it's world history, there's a lot of stuff that the kids don't need to know about as far as like, “How does this affect my daily life?”
Bu, when we're talking about the emperors and the ideas of an exploitative or suppressive power and how you keep the people in line in a social contract, that's something that they can feel every single day, whether a Democrat or Republican student. So I really try and emulate those questions of self reflection every single day at some point.
BRODIE: When you're trying to have those conversations and think of ways to reach your students and maybe make the material relevant to them, how often do you think back to your school experience and maybe what didn't work?
BURNTON: I'd say I think that pretty frequently. But I think I rely more on my students of what didn't work last year, what didn't work two years before? But yeah, I'd say I reflect almost daily on my past life and how that shaped me, and it, it made me like, reflect on the teachers who I also had where it's like, “Yeah, what could they have done differently or how could I emulate what they did do and then just modify it a little bit to reach these students?”
BRODIE: What is it like to teach social studies right now, during this kind of climate that we're in?
BURNTON: You know, it's, it's something that I think on pen and paper, it's easy to be worried about. But in my classroom, I really try and hit home that, being 31, I don't have all the answers. I can't tell these parents, “This is what's best for your kids,” when I don't have kids. We're all trying to come together as a community, and as long as you acknowledge, not where I stand because my students still have not bingo cards, but they're trying to figure out, “What's my religion? What's my political stance?”
So instead of telling them what they're supposed to think, really just laying it out of how do people perceive this, not how it is, but what's the perception of it, that concept or that framing of it makes it a lot more accessible and kind of safer to teach.
BRODIE: Well, kind of sounds like you're doing for your students, what your instructors in college did, where you realized, through what they were teaching you, that you have agency over your life and sort of the direction it's gonna go. It sounds like you are very much trying to make your students understand that they have agency over what they think about things and how they learn about things. And just because something seems a certain way doesn't necessarily mean that is how it is or how it has to be.
BURNTON: Exactly. I think that's like the one thing that I'd want them to take away from my classroom is history — yes, we study it but it's also constantly moving, and we are making history. And I know it's easy to hear that as a slogan, but when these students realize how young these revolutionists were, how much power we actually have at local levels, it can kind of click when you have to draw it out for them though, right?
We all kind of had that epiphany. But yeah, you're absolutely right. That is, that's like the one thing that I need them or at least I want them to understand it like they do — it's not just they matter, but they have control over what tomorrow looks like.
BRODIE: What does it mean to you to be the 2024-2025 Arizona teacher of the year?
BURNTON: That's a good question. What does it mean to me? There's a lot riding not unnecessarily on my shoulders, but there's so many people that I want to bring to light with being the AZ 2024-2025 teacher of the year.
There's so many people on the stage that night or the candidates who got nominated where it's, I now want to be whether it's a voice or even a connection to the average person who hears stories like this and the teachers who are in the classroom. You know, sometimes it feels like there's a divide right now when you talk about the climate, what's actually happening in the classroom.
And so being the teacher of the year is something where it's like, “OK, now I want to or I have to be that voice for all of these teachers, so we can have an open forum with the rest of the state.” You know, where they can understand that we are all doing this for the children.
BRODIE: What do you think your junior high and high school self would think about the fact that you're the teacher of the year?
BURNTON: I think they'd wonder who I paid off, probably.
BRODIE: And how much, right?
BURNTON: Yeah, exactly. Because there was like, “There's no way we're doing well enough in school now to afford that. But you did it.” So, yeah, I think honestly if you would ask me even 48 hours before the awards ceremony, or five minutes before the announcement, I wouldn't have said I was. So, yeah, just in shock.
I will say in middle school, I think it was probably my eighth grade year. I started signing people's yearbooks like, “You can sell this when I'm famous.” So I think we're a step closer to that now, which is cool. So really, I'm giving back to the community by them being able to sell those yearbooks if teacher of the year is a big enough award for that.
