Teacher of the Issue: Blake off to a quick-start in education, follows his childhood passion
Coppell High School AP World History teacher Connor Blake shows his seventh period class an example of a properly structured document based question (DBQ) on Dec. 2. Blake has been selected as The Sidekick’s Volume 34 No. 3 Teacher of the Issue.
December 15, 2022
Coppell High School AP World History teacher Connor Blake knew he wanted to be a teacher from a young age.
“I had a fantastic U.S. History teacher named Max Callahan, and he was a master storyteller,” Blake said. “Even though it’s U.S history, not super exciting stuff, the way he told the story and the connections to real life, I wanted to be like him. I want to be a teacher, I want to change kids’ lives for the better. It all worked out for me ever since eighth grade.”
After high school, Blake went to the University of North Texas for a bachelor’s degree in history and started his teaching career as a student-teacher at Lewisville High School. His mentor, whom he still keeps in contact with, AP World History and AP U.S. History teacher Maribel Pluenneke, now teaches at Hurst L.D. Bell High School.
“He was literally on fire the minute he stepped into the room,” Pluenneke said. “He was very eager to take over. I would literally just hand him the class on the first or second day. You normally don’t get that with student teachers. Normally it takes them a week or two to [get to] where you can trust them to take over the class. But with Mr. Blake, he was ready to go. He’s grown to the point where he gives a teacher who’s been teaching 25 years resources.”
It is currently Blake’s fifth year of teaching and as a relatively new and young teacher, he maintains that he still has a lot to learn. He is eager to learn more about teaching and history and is constantly striving to improve himself.
“Teachers should be lifelong learners,” Blake said. “They shouldn’t be sitting there, saying ‘I have it down, let me just open up a book and here’s an assignment I’ve been using for 20 years.’ Their craft should always be improving, should always be changing in terms of the kids that we get every year. I never want to do the same thing twice, just dusting something off and saying, ‘here you go.’ I’m constantly tinkering with things; I’m constantly saying ‘well how about we do it this way,’ just to see what works and what doesn’t work. Sometimes it blows up in my face, sometimes it works.”
His passion started with Egyptology and spread into U.S. history and ancient history. As a teacher, he expected to teach U.S. history as that was his main focus in school and college; however, he embraced world history when he got the job at CHS.
“World history is the gift that keeps on giving,” Blake said. “There’s so much history, and even when I retire, I’ll never have all of world history mastered. World history is as relevant as ever in the 21st century. There’s so many connections to what’s happening around the world and in our own country. Even as sophomores, at 15-16, they’re eventually going to leave CHS. They’re going to become active members of society. They need to be aware of what’s happening in the world, and they need to make sense of why something is happening the way it is. As a collective human society, we need educated, engaged people who are doing their best for every single member of society.”
Constantly working to make AP World History an engaging class, Blake works with the AP World History team to make different, unique and effective lesson plans.
“Mr. Blake is a really young teacher; this is only his fifth year teaching, and since he’s been here, the amount of work he’s put in, not just for his kids but the team, to make sure that every [AP World History] class and every kid is having a good experience in AP World History,” CHS AP World History and AP Comparative Government teacher Shawn Hudson said. “We’ve been successful in teaching a class that is AP but also really welcoming to kids, and he’s a real big part in making sure that happens. Our team, my life, would be worse if Mr. Blake wasn’t here. He has really taken on the idea that if we’re going to do something in AP World History, it has to be intentional, it has to be something of value to kids.”
His efforts to get students learning and understanding the content and staying engaged has been working. Most of Blake’s students have positive reviews of Blake himself and the class itself.
“He’s an overachiever in a good way; he always goes out of his way to make sure that I understand something,” sophomore Ajay Mathew said. “The way he teaches is really straightforward. Everything he says, I can really understand. It’s not confusing. Every time he teaches, he’s really passionate about what he’s doing, and he really has meaning to everything he says.”
Outside of school, Blake does his best to maintain a healthy work-life balance; however his passion for history means that some of his hobbies tend to be work adjacent.
“I love reading,” Blake said. “I love to read about world history. I don’t really read fiction anymore, I find the real world to be much more fascinating. There’s always so many nooks and crannies in world history I don’t know.”
Outside of his passion for history and teaching , Blake likes to watch the news and admits to watching TV when he probably should be grading. He takes recommendations from his students, and finished the manga and anime “Demon Slayer” last year per student recommendation. He likes stories that introduce him to different cultures and have social commentary. One piece of media Blake is very passionate about is Star Wars.
“I love Star Wars,” Blake said. “I think that’s where I got my knack for all the specific details because I would read all the books concerning my favorite brands. I would pick up on all these specific details and as I transferred to history, that came with it.”
His passion for Star Wars is shared with Hudson and is among the many topics they discuss when not working together to improve the AP World History class at CHS.
“Once we got into an argument in a team meeting about the nomenclature of Imperial Star Destroyer names,” Hudson said. “He kept insisting it was one thing and I was like, ‘no you’re dumb; that’s not it.’ The rest of the guys in the team were just staring at us.”
While willing to discuss non-history related passions with colleagues and students, Blake happens to take his job seriously.
“I wish in my first five years of teaching that I was even remotely as on top of teaching as he is,” Hudson said. “I’m not saying that there’s not things he’ll add or improve on as he gets more experienced, but I’ve never spent time with a brand new teacher who had stuff together the way he did. It’s impressive.”
Blake decided he wanted to teach history to high schoolers because of how deep he can go into the contents of history, which he cannot do to the same extent while teaching middle and elementary schoolers. He also wants to teach high schoolers because it is that final step before students become adults and step out into the world.
“High school is very much the foundation that kids leap off of,” Blake said. “Half of the enjoyment of my job is to see the growth and development of my kids to when they are sophomores to where they end up as seniors and where they’re going off to, to see that transformation. That’s a payoff in my mind.”
One of the most important things Blake wants students to learn from his class is not history itself, but something far more important.
“One of the things we have to learn as humans is that we are going to hit setbacks,” Blake said. “I’ve hit setbacks in high school; I’ve hit setbacks in college; I’ve hit setbacks in my career, dealing with various things. Failure is not a bad thing inherently; it’s something we can learn from. Learning from failure is the greatest life lesson we can have and, [we can utilize] that to make the world a better place.”
Blake takes inspiration from the teachers he’s had in the past, hoping to emulate the teachers that inspired him to teach and to become a teacher he would want to have.
“One of the questions I also ask student teachers is ‘Why did you decide to do this? ‘Why did you want to become a teacher?’ because I want to know their core motivation for doing this,” Pluenneke said. “He said he wanted to be what his teachers were to him and I knew right away that he’s going to be an excellent teacher.”
While Blake has improved and excelled a lot since he first started teaching, this is still the beginning of his teaching career and he has many students and plenty of new historical knowledge to look forward to.
“It’s an honor to work with the students of CHS, the faculty of CHS, the administration of CHS,” Blake said. “They’ve given me so much as a relatively young teacher so I look forward to continuing to grow in myself and make CHS a better place than what it is currently and also improving upon what we’re currently doing at CHS.”
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