Natalie Benson

Chinook Writer

Cindy Huckfeldt taught multiple generations of students since she began teaching at age 36. Now that she’s retired from public school teaching after 23 years, Huckfeldt works at the Casper College Writing Center. Despite no longer teaching traditionally, Huckfeldt didn’t retire from teaching altogether. 

“I do this because it feeds that piece of me that still needs to teach,” Huckfeldt said about working at the writing center.

For the majority of her teaching years, Huckfeldt taught middle school English. While she wanted to teach high school, Huckfedlt said that God kept placing her in middle schools where kids just needed someone to love them where they were and understand where they were at. Huckfeldt’s own middle school teacher influenced her feelings about students.

“I didn’t learn to read until I was in seventh grade,” Huckfeldt said, “I had a very chaotic childhood, and we changed schools a lot. And when you’re worried about safety, you’re not worrying about your alphabet. My life was a lot calmer by middle school, and I had a teacher that handed me the right book at the right time.”

Because of her experience, Huckfeldt was determined to help her own students, which definitely showed in her approach to teaching.

Keenan Morgan, an education major and one of Huckfeldt’s former students, said, “I think that there are some teachers that you can tell don’t care. But she wasn’t like that. You could tell that she did and that if you needed something, you could probably go to her for it.”

Morgan also shared how Huckfeldt helped him in middle school with a test that would make or break his grade over a book that he didn’t enjoy. While he still didn’t enjoy the book, Huckfeldt helped him understand where he needed to study and read, and he was able to pass the test. Morgan said she was also very understanding when it came to recitation tests, helping students in a way that acknowledged their fear of presenting, instead of just having them push through regardless of their feelings on the matter.

Huckfeldt shared that many students who came through her class didn’t enjoy reading. She said some students didn’t have the skills and needed something to interest them so that they could practice, and others didn’t like to read because they had never been handed something that interested them. Huckfeldt said she empathized with the students and found something that would interest them, turning, as she put it, non-readers into readers. She also said that she loved how students brought new eyes and insights to books she had taught for years, or would say hilarious things that she still remembers fondly.

While Huckfeldt enjoyed teaching at public schools, her time at the Writing Center is also enjoyable because of the difference in environment. She said she can still teach but doesn’t have to deal with meetings and parents, and she’s done working the moment she leaves. Huckfeldt said the writing center is also generally in a much lower stress environment where she can also work one-on-one with students, whether once or multiple times, and can give them the tools for future papers and assignments.

Along with English, Huckfeldt also teaches quilting. 

“I have a group of little old ladies that I meet with once a week, and I do a lot of teaching and tutoring on that because they all love quilting, but not any of them had really any formal training,” Huckfeldt said with a laugh. “Come to think of it, neither have I, but I’ve got it figured out.”

In her years of teaching traditionally at public schools and university, Huckfeldt taught students from ages 11 to 60. With the community quilting class, that number goes up to age 92, adding to the multiple generations that Huckfeldt taught.

According to Huckfeldt, her favorite thing about teaching came in the connection with her students. Not only the connections day-to-day in the classroom, but also the connections with students she sees in the Writing Center, which aren’t as long term but are just as meaningful. To Huckfeldt, the compensation for teaching was the connections she made with the students.

“It’s the paycheck. You know? Teachers don’t get paid tremendously well, it’s not starvation, but… the payday comes in those relationships that work, and finding out, you know, “Mrs. Huckfeldt, I need to talk to you about what happened in my life”,” Huckfeldt said.

As she’s getting older, Huckfeldt also said it might be time to begin the next chapter in her life.

“It’s getting probably time to retire again here pretty soon. I’m pushing 70 pretty awful hard,” Huckfeldt chuckled. “So it’ll, you know… step out into the unknown again. …It’s good for your blood pressure.”