John Burghardt Enters a New Chapter

DURING THE 2024 GRADUATION CEREMONY, John Burghardt received an honorary high school degree, a wooden plaque that Head of School Russell Shaw described as a rarity because “no retiring teacher receives a diploma from GDS except if they’ve taught masterfully and selflessly for 49 years in our School.” 

John said the diploma was an “uncannily insightful” gesture because his time as a GDS English teacher was definitely an education. He received the plaque after delivering remarks on behalf of the faculty, his fourth or fifth time in that role– and his last. The speech marked the beginning of his official retirement.*

Looking back, John realizes he was probably a different person, a different kind of teacher, each time he walked up to that podium. But at every turn, he never doubted that the work he was given was worth doing, he said. 

“When I started teaching at GDS, I was overwhelmed with the grading and everything else. I envied the senior teachers who had all of that behind them,” John said. “But every 10 years or so, I discovered that the difficulties would never be behind me, that it’s just a really hard job. Some parts of it became second nature, but every stage exposed me to challenges I had not thought about yet.”

From the Motor City to the Nation’s Capital

John grew up the oldest of five siblings in the Detroit suburbs, where he attended Catholic schools and earned a full academic scholarship that landed him in the honors program at the University of Detroit.

His family’s intellectual focus leaned toward the quantitative and logical. His father, a Navy veteran, was an accountant at General Motors. His siblings chose careers in biophysics, math, electron microscopic biochemistry, and banking. Even his son, Keith Burghardt ’08, is a computer scientist. 

“I took on the squishiest subject,” John said. He didn’t see it coming. As an undergraduate, John had his sights set on law school—until he discovered the literature curriculum. “Those classes were the ones I looked forward to, and the work wasn’t work,” he said. “It was just the pursuit of what I would have wanted to do on my own had I been capable of finding it on my own.”

Captivated by the field, John pursued a doctorate in literature at the University of Michigan, intent on becoming a college professor. While writing his dissertation, he moved to Washington with his wife at the time. She took a job at the Labor Department, and to earn some extra cash, he signed up as a substitute teacher at local private schools—a decision that changed his career trajectory.

By then, John was becoming disillusioned with the idea of a professorship having watched many talented classmates hop from one college to another as they chased after tenure-track positions. “Gypsy scholars,” he called them, all living a hand-to-mouth existence in a dismal job market while researching arcane topics. 

“I realized that what most interested me was putting students in a relationship that’s responsive to great literature, and that kind of thinking seemed to be happening more in a high school setting than in the world of a college professor,” John said. “In high school, I could focus my whole brain on iconic texts and have students read them in a way that brings meaning and pleasure.”

“He made you want to learn”

With this shift in perspective, John took a full-time teaching job at Virginia’s Flint Hill School in 1974. A year later, at age 29, he joined GDS as a Middle School humanities teacher. At the time, all three divisions of the School were in a single building, now home to the River School. 

Having previously substituted at GDS, John was impressed by its emphasis on joyful learning—a sharp contrast to his Catholic school experience, he said, which “toughened you up but bruised you a little too.” Five years later, he transitioned to the High School. 

Matt Rubenstein ’84, who was a freshman when John joined the High School, remembers him being an avid biker and a rock climbing enthusiast who was so well-liked and respected that students were constantly vying for his attention. 

“He was athletic, intellectual, iconoclastic, irreverent, and also a very demanding teacher,” added Matt, now a pianist in Berlin. “He never dumbed things down, and he had a partisan approach to literature that was very much against the grain of the perceived canon. For example, when we read The Merchant of Venice, he had us consider if Shylock [often cast as the villain] was the hero. So he liked to have us learn the canon and then learn not to like it. It was all very exciting.”

By the time Hayley Gordon Pivato ’88 was a senior, the High School had just moved to its current location on Davenport Street, and John was widely considered the in-house literary and writing guru. He would go on to teach English classes at every grade level, oversee the student-led Grasslands literary magazine, and run a popular Philosophy Club. John also taught a course on Shakespeare and a creative writing class that captured Hayley’s imagination during her last year at GDS.

Knowing that Hayley was an art lover, John encouraged her to model her senior thesis after Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, a collection of William Blake’s illustrated poems. Together, they examined Blake’s method of integrating his poems with images that he personally engraved, handprinted, and colored. 

“I taught myself to use the High School’s new etching press, and I made my own etchings and poems inspired by Blake. I still have them,” said Hayley, a professional artist. “I ended up majoring in printmaking at Cornell because of that experience. Etchings are not my main art form anymore, but they remain a passion of mine, along with poetry, of course, because of John.” 

Many former students spoke about John’s knack for honoring the unique gifts of each person he taught, his eye for quality in books, songs, and other art forms, and his unusual versatility as an educator. 

Andrew Weiner ’90, a writer and filmmaker, said John’s English classes were “electric.” What surprised him, however, was discovering that John was equally adept at teaching geometry and astronomy. In geometry, he would approach the material with genuine curiosity. If the class struggled with a problem he could not solve, John would look at the teacher’s answer key and work alongside them to uncover the solution, Andrew said. By the end, even students who considered themselves “bad” at math came away with a solid understanding of geometry. 

“He was the best teacher I had. There was no close second,” said Andrew. “I loved every one of his classes because he made you want to learn.”

Fun in a serious way

For Julia Fisher ’09—an HS English teacher and GDS alumna—John’s genius lay in his ability to connect ideas in ways that felt both obvious and revelatory. 

Julia witnessed this firsthand as one of his English students. “I loved his tests,” she said. “He would present a plausible argument and then challenge you to make a different one, and then press you to pay attention to certain words and that could change the argument again,” she said. “He had this way of hinting at a destination, but how you got there was entirely up to you. I’d walk out of his tests thinking, ‘Well, that was fun!’” 

As his GDS colleague, Julia came to recognize another of John’s distinctive features: his unwavering belief in the brilliance of his students. “He calls it grading from the inside out,” she said. “He is so smart and dexterous in his thinking that he sees a tiny kernel of an idea in everything and nurtures it.” 

In an email responding to news of John’s retirement, Washington Post investigative reporter Isaac Stanley-Becker ’12 wrote about how studying with John always sparked philosophical questions, such as the ethics of vengeance in William Faulkner’s “Barn Burning” or the nature of the soul in James Joyce’s “The Dead.” As a senior, Isaac wanted to explore that angle further, so he and John devised an independent study project that examined ethics, human nature, power, and personal responsibility through literary and philosophical lenses.

They read the confessional poet Anne Sexton and the psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim, Isaac said. They spent hours discussing Plato’s allegory of the cave. John pressed him to consider how meaning is created and communicated.

“I still wear John’s lessons like an amulet—that meaning arises from juxtaposition, that ambiguity can be found in unexpected places, that nothing is beyond question, and that every proposition can be reframed or reconsidered,” Isaac wrote. “What most profoundly shaped me in John’s teaching is how passionately he advocated for the text: the word, the sentence, the stanza, the story. John convinced us that we could step inside these texts and that they would hold charismatic power that might change our life and change the world.” 

Carrying it around for a lifetime

During his college years and then again when he wrote his first novel, author Ben Dolnick ’00 would reach out to John regularly for feedback on his work. John would respond with articulate, even poetic, emails, dense with surprising images and intelligent criticism boiled down to its essence, Ben said. 

“I had professors who were accomplished writers, but I was much more interested in hearing from John,” he added. “Even now, in my 40s, I have internalized him as my first reader. I think about what he would say. Would he find the writing honest? Or perhaps stupid? He’s still in there.”

As his career drew to a close, John reflected on how his relationships with students always felt personal because reading and writing are soul-searching activities. What he tried to convey to them, he said, is that the value of literature does not unfold like a mathematical theorem that delivers neat answers. 

“As an English teacher, you are introducing a text in the matrix of conversation between students in a class. They talk their way through it, explore it, ask hard, and maybe undecidable, questions,” John said. “You may feel you’ve gained enough mastery of the material that you’re entitled to some interpretive opinions. But you’re never really done with the book, and the book is never done with you. You can keep it with you, maybe for a lifetime, and make it part of the way you think, not just what you think about.” 

* John returned to support the school as a long-term substitute teacher this year–and we’re so happy to have him back, if even for a short period.
 

(Originally published in Georgetown Days magazine Fall/Winter 2024)