Bradbury moves to new adventures after teaching 31 years

After spending 31 years teaching in local schools, Havre Middle School language arts and family consumer science teacher Cathie Bradbury, is retiring.

"It's been a long, long journey and one I've enjoyed, and so I'm ready for new adventures," she said.

She said that she wanted to be a teacher since she was a child, and remembers that she would even set up her own classroom during the summers.

"I just always wanted to be a teacher," she said.

Bradbury graduated from high school in 1979 from Lathrop High School in Fairbanks, Alaska.

She said she first came to Havre the summer after she graduated, following her father, a minister, planning to go to college in Oregon. But it was in Havre where she met her husband, Bill, and decided to stay. They got married, had three children together and own a ranch south of Havre in the Bear Paw Mountains.

When the summer ended, instead of going to Oregon for college, she enrolled in Northern Montana College - now Montana State University-Northern. At Northern, she would obtain a bachelor's degree in basic business and elementary education, a minor in specialist reading and a master's in learning environments. Bradbury added that she also attended classes at Montana State University and the University of Montana.

She said that, between her own education and her time as an educator, she has spent 52 years in education.

She started teaching in 1988, shortly after her son, Clint, was born.

She added, she first started teaching on the Rocky Boy's Indian Reservation, teaching for eight years.

"I really enjoyed my time teaching at Rocky Boy," she said.

When she first started, she taught English to seventh- and eighth-grade students, but a year later went on to sixth-grade students as the general teacher for her remaining time at Rocky Boy, she said. She added that, after eight years, to avoid the commute, and because her children were attending school in Havre, she went to teach at Havre Middle School.

When she started at the middle school, she taught seventh grade as the communication arts and reading teacher, and also taught geography, keyboarding, careers and cooking during her career.

She said, her favorite class to teach was cooking, because she could see how excited the students were to cook.

"I just like how proud the kids look after they make whatever it is they made, just the pride," she said.

She started teaching the cooking class after the previous teacher retired. She said she liked to cook and had been involved in cooking with the local 4-H club and was thought it would be a good fit. In the beginning, she was only teaching one cooking class, but later her class size would increase into six different cooking classes.

One of the activities she would do with her class, she said, would be to take a class trip to Beaver Creek Park, where she would show the students how to forage for chokecherries. The class would later take the chokecherries they collected and make syrup and learn how to jar properly.

Bradbury said that through her career, she would hear from her former students and her students' parents that they continue to use her recipes and the skills they learned in her class.

In the start of every year, she said, she would start teaching her students something basic, something they would be able to easily do at home. For her eighth-grade students, near the end of the course, she would let her students find their own recipes. The students would have to plan, organize and judge the food, such as bacon-wrapped barbecue meatloaf and meatball subs.

But the big thing for her was her students, she said.

"I believe it takes a whole village to raise a child, and just to able to give kids those hands-on opportunities and to let them just to dig in and do," she said.

She added that she would regularly talk to her students and try to help them through whatever challenges they were going through.

"Even though they are so young, sometimes the baggage that they're carrying is such a heavy load," she said.

She said that she drew strength in her teaching by adding humor - it is beneficial to the students and the teacher to incorporate humor to a situation. She added that when teaching middle school students, their bodies are changing, growing up, and their moods can fluctuate rapidly.

Cooking is an important class for some students, Bradbury said, such as students who struggle with reading and writing. Cooking class was something that added to their success and added, to their joy.

She said that school budgets are being cut due to reduced funding, and she won't be replaced. Instead Havre High School Family and Consumer Science teacher Marit Ita will be coming from the high school to teach a cooking class at the middle school. She added that it's kind of scary losing the cooking program and industrial arts classes in the future; it is a huge disadvantage to the students.

Hopefully, the community doesn't lose those programs, she said, and people need to speak to their legislators and let them know communities, even rural communities, need those programs.

"It's going to make a big difference," she said.

Bradbury said that her last day with her students she read them a book called, "What do You do with a Chance," written by Kobi Yamada. The book encourages students to take a chance, even when they fail, to get back up and try again, she said. She added that she thought it was a good message to leave with her students.

"When an opportunity comes knocking at your door, to open that door and be ready and go for it," she said. "You might fall on your face but that's OK, that's called learning and just keep going."

She also made her students smoothies for a "smoothie sailing" in their futures, she said.

In her retirement she wants to travel and visit her two daughters, Marie and Christi, and visit her grandchildren, she said.

"They'll keep me busy," she said.

She added that she will also be home on her family's ranch to help out more. She also plans to travel to Kentucky next month to visit her aunt, who is turning 90 July 1.

Something that is on her bucket list, she said, is to travel and explore Europe, starting with Ireland.

But no matter what adventures lay in store, she will miss her students, she said. She treated the students like her own children, she added.

"I guess that's just always how I've looked at kids, just like my own," she said.

She said at times every student needed discipline, but also needed love and understanding.

"I want to thank all the community members for sharing their children with me," she said. "It was a lot of fun and a privilege to be part of the students' lives and give them something that they can use for the rest of their lives."