Even when Mrs. Vickers is not keeping up with her five sections of English grading, facilitating interviews for Glenbard South’s yearbook or providing feedback to a member of her Speech Team during rehearsal, she still finds enough time in the day to save it. Regarded in the building as a beacon of knowledge and light, Vickers has a story for every occasion and a pep in her step that never lets up. This spring will be her last at South, but students and staff alike can trust that her own story remains a steady undercurrent in our halls.
Just as she resolves to always show up for her students every weekday, Vickers has long dedicated her Saturdays to trekking across town in a minibus full of business-casual-clad public speakers so that her schools’ speech teams could flourish at their weekly tournaments. She first coached Speech at Wheaton North. Since then, Vickers has overseen the Raider Speech Team for 10 years, nine of which saw her team members advancing from IHSA Regionals to Sectionals in a variety of events. “Ms. Vickers’ legacy is one of a humble leader who is completely devout to the activities she commits herself to,” says junior and Speech Team Co-Captain Riven Wisniewski.
The intersection of her interests hardly ends there, as Vickers quickly found yet another haven for her love for linguistics through the Yearbook Clubs of both Oswego and Glenbard South High School. The face of South’s yearbook for all 29 years of her Glen Ellyn career, Vickers was naturally drawn to a role of mentorship in this extracurricular by its timeless ability to capture memories while forming new ones along the way. “It is an important memory book, and I think, even though a lot of books have gone to digital mode, I don’t think our yearbook ever will because there’s just something about holding that book in your hands and flipping through those pages. It’s tactile.”
Senior and Yearbook Editor in Chief Carl Aresta can recall no deficit of instances when Vickers has proven her investment as not only that of an instructor, but also an eager mentor. “She’s really helpful and dependable in the context of Yearbook Club,” Aresta said. He joined Yearbook Club during his freshman year. Once a week, he would spend an afternoon growing his design skills under Vickers’ ready guidance. Each morning, too, before the English 1H class he had with her, Aresta was able to debrief with Vickers on the progress he had made on his assigned yearbook pages since. “I really appreciated those morning conversations because they increased my interest in feature writing and photography basics. For the past four years, I felt motivated and connected to creating the yearbook because of her dedication to the club,” he added.
According to Vickers, it is her extensive extracurricular involvement–especially in organizations that rely on connection and communication–that lends itself to the seemingly supernatural power of each smile. “You’re really working together on something,” Vickers said. “You feel like you’re one of them more than…you would…in the classroom. It’s just a little glimpse into their real lives. Getting to spend personal time with kids in the activities was one of my favorite things.”
This reinvention, for Vickers, centered largely around her trusty guides: compassion and humanity. “I feel like people can’t learn very well if they think people don’t care about them. I mean, I obviously think knowledge is really, really important, but I think it falls flat if it’s not human,” Ms. Vickers said. “We’re trying to find ways to have kids find ways to enter into a text. I want them to actually care about it. We’re always questioning the books that we teach and the texts that we teach: ‘Is this relevant?’ Because, if it’s not, it’s just got to fall flat.”
The effects of these thoughtful metamorphoses have reverberated throughout South’s English department as well as throughout Vickers’ classroom. “Ms. Vickers has a support style that borders on motherly,” English teacher Mr. Aye said. “The cliche ‘We are a family’ gets thrown out so often these days, but Ms. Vickers actually makes the familial tone a priority when she is supporting people in whatever context she is serving in.” Aye, who was paired up to be Vickers’ mentee for the first two years of his career at South, hardly needs to be prompted before he can launch into a tale exemplifying Vickers’ kindness. To this day, he has kept the “Little Raider” onesie that Vickers handmade for his daughter as a welcome gift. “It was an immediate sign that I was going to be taken care of as I stepped into the scary experience of starting at a new school,” he said.
Vickers’ students, too, see her exercising a humane blend of empathy and expertise. “She is very knowledgeable when it comes to not only grammar and English, but also how student relationships work and classroom environments,” freshman and English 1H student Nora Martinez said.
Even in the face of education’s ever-changing mold, Vickers does not allow her faith in the potential of her students to waver. Truly, if Vickers could leave this building’s incoming generation of English students with anything, it would be a strong ego boost. “[I want them to take away] this confidence that they can do it, that they can learn,” Vickers said. “They can apply themselves, they can do things they didn’t think they could do and they don’t have to be afraid of trying new things.”
As a current high school student and an aspiring teacher, I recognize that teaching just about any first period class is a feat worthy of praise. As a freshman walking into Room 306 on my first day of high school, I understood Mrs. Vickers to be nothing short of a superhero. There were exactly twelve people in my first period English 1H class–a fact that terrified me and somehow did not seem to bother my teacher at all. To my utter amazement, she carried herself with the very same optimism, poise and enthusiasm that her other classes could expect from her. To this day, Mrs. Vickers reminds us that not all heroes wear capes, but that this teacher might as well.
