Howard English teacher retires after 41 years of learning from students

English teacher Julia Manard still makes her students write essays with pen and paper. She refuses to have laptops in her classroom and can’t believe that her students sometimes hand in AI-written essays.

This year she walked her students through “Beowulf,” “Frankenstein” and “The Crucible,” but her favorite novel to teach is “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

“Every year I did ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ I told my students it was like I didn’t want to retire because it was like I was leaving Atticus,” she said.

Though she is now retiring and leaving Atticus behind after 35 years in Bibb County Public Schools, Manard said she will miss her students the most. 

She’s taught all grades at Northeast, Rutland and Howard high schools.

She subscribes to the idea that teachers who “learn with their students last forever,” something she picked up from Socrates.

Manard said she does her best to develop connections with students and treats them like they’re 25-year-olds and not teenagers. She prides herself on not having any troublemakers in her classes.

“I tell them always, ‘never settle,’” she said. “That’s one of my big things.”

Before starting teaching at Northeast High School in 1990, she worked as a substitute at a now-defunct Macon private school. 

Manard’s parents were both teachers. Her mother taught at the same Macon private school and her father taught law at Mercer.

“I kind of got thrown into it thinking I was just gonna sub and it just became a passion,” she said. 

In between starting at Northeast and retiring at Howard, she taught English and drama classes at Rutland.

Cameron Chesnut was one of her students in 2011. He got back in touch with her recently when he saw she was retiring on Facebook.

As someone with cerebral palsy, Chesnut said Manard took his condition into consideration when teaching him reading comprehension and helped him through book reports and quizzes.

She led him to an appreciation for reading stories like 

“Macbeth,” he said, especially now that he’s older and doesn’t have to take a test on the books.

“She’s just a really supportive teacher,” he said. “She helped me the most when it came to learning to not get discouraged when I didn’t immediately grasp a concept within a story.”

She said she’s seen it all during her 41 years, from Columbine to 9/11. Manard came close to quitting during the pandemic because of having to teach from home, but said she wouldn’t let COVID-19 dictate when she would retire.

But with Howard undergoing renovations and starting a new schedule, Manard decided it was time to close this chapter in her life. 

“I feel like they kept me young,” she said of her students. “I tell them that I’ve learne d from them, and that just made me keep going.”