Anet Hammett is retiring from Brookside Primary School after 32 years of teaching kindergarten, including 26 at Brookside and four years at the former Duxbury Corner School. She racked up another two years working as a long-term sub including gigs in The Valley schools.
In a recent Zoom interview in her classroom where she was surrounded by the not inconsequential supplies, artwork and accouterments of teaching such young students, Hammett said she will absolutely come back to volunteer in the school.
She is a native of Oswego, New York, where she and her husband grew up. They moved to Moretown and later Duxbury. They still have a family home on the water in Oswego and that’s where she’ll spend time once she is retired. Her mother is 92 and she is looking forward to being able to spend more time with her and work on house and garden and art projects in Vermont and New York.
When she started teaching kindergarten, the emphasis was on reading and counting and it still is, but now kids all have their own iPads and on the day of the interview, Hammett said students had just done animal reports where they picked a Vermont animal and used a program called Pebble Go to report on what their animal looks like, its habitat and diet.
“They have headphones and they use this program which they can navigate very well. They’re very good at it,” Hammett said.
Despite the technology, the focus for kindergarteners is still reading and counting.
“When I first started, we used journal writing and story writing and collaborative reading and writing. So now, more specific programs are incorporated. The kids write almost every day in here. They're all authors and readers,” she said, adding that last week they were writing letters to their future first grade teachers.
Hammett is the daughter of two teachers. Her father was social studies professor in elementary education and her mother was an elementary school teacher, first in music and later in gifted education programs. She was an art major first and moved to Vermont but apparently teaching is in her DNA because she returned to New York and got her education degree and came back to Vermont.
Once back here, the opportunity to submit a portfolio to teach kindergarten at the Duxbury Corner School with former principal Cindy Senning arose and she found her niche.
“Cindy is wonderful. She’s an outstanding person in our community and I highly respect her and I actually have her granddaughter in class this year,” Hammett said.
Asked what kept her coming back every fall, Hammett said she really loved kindergarteners and loved full day scheduling for them. She said she loves the continuity of being at the same school and seeing her students progress through fifth grade. She has an intern working with her this year who was one of her students.
She loves watching her students mature over the course of the school year, gaining independence and confidence and learning to express emotional needs and display their natural curiosity.
She has 15 students this year and she said they’re ready to move on to first grade.
“You can tell when they’re ready because they want their own individual space. They’ll set themselves up at the science table, some kids use the house area or another table as a desk. One student has this police officer hat over in the corner and we have two officers here. They set up their own space. You can watch them grow that much just within a year,” she said.
