Judy Butterfield is joining the Lick-Wilmerding High School community as an English Teacher. She recently graduated with a Masters in Literature from Bread Loaf School of English in Middlebury, Vermont. She is teaching English 3 Honors and Journalism this year at LWHS.
A Bay Area native, Butterfield graduated from Urban High School in 2008 and loves coming home to the Outer Sunset at the end of each day. She appreciates the community she has found in her neighborhood, and noted that her close proximity to the ocean is a “pretty magical way to start the day.”
Although Butterfield has been a high school educator for the past eight years, she is teaching Journalism for the first time and is excited to explore a new form of storytelling with her students. She also acknowledges her anxieties: “to have something where all of the students’ writing is going to be read by the broader community, the stakes are higher.”
She is no stranger to leaning into discomfort and actively encourages her students to do the same, embodying a fundamental LWHS value. Butterfield remarked that she enjoys trying new things because regardless of the outcome, she knows she will grow as a person. “I want [my students] to be able to access that in themselves,” she said.
In 2012, Butterfield went outside of her comfort zone and spent a year full-time on a vegetable farm. This eventually grew into a love of farmwork and gardening that she still practices today. Whether it is working part-time on a farm or building a friend’s garden, Butterfield values the intensity and fulfillment that comes with this kind of work. “That has really fed me in a lot of ways, and then it also literally feeds you,” she joked.
Butterfield encourages all of her students to see themselves as artists, and believes that her job as an English teacher is to help her students learn to interact with art around them. Butterfield focuses her lessons on the philosophy that all learning is creative and works to implement this idea no matter the subject matter of her class. Especially at a rigorous institution like LWHS, she would like her students to remember to embrace all parts of themselves, no matter what boxes they believe they may fit into.
When not in the English Department office, Butterfield can be found pulling the weeds in LWHS’ garden, developing film at the Harvey Milk Photo Center or road tripping across the country.
