An Interview with Recently Retired WINGS teacher, Catia Gilpin
By Elana Hadi
While I attended WINGS, I was fortunate to have Mrs. Catia Gilpin for three major units. Mrs. Gilpin is a passionate teacher who loves curiosity and looking at things from creative and artistic vantage points. My favorite major unit with her was math and mosaics, which can be found as the mosaic floor art in the grass area surrounded by the Phelps parking lot. Although Mrs. Gilpin retired this past May (2018), she taught lifelong lessons. It was very interesting and fun to learn from and interview a teacher as committed and passionate about education as she is.
Catia Gilpin was born in Texas and raised in Chicago, Illinois. When she was growing up, there was a push to encourage science and mathematics but not really for women. Mrs. Gilpin primarily attended public schools in elementary and middle school. When it was time for high school, her parents told her that she was going to be taking a test. She did not know that this was a test for a gifted program at the University of Chicago Laboratory School. She got in and enjoyed the experience as she was able to focus heavily on creative subjects. After high school, she was not interested in attending college yet and wanted to backpack through Europe. Her parents, as she says, were “not thrilled” with that idea. So, they made a deal. She would attend a college in France. She attended for a semester, then went to Paris, France at a time right after the 1968 riots. Her parents then encouraged her to go to Israel.
After Israel, she came back to the United States and decided to stay with a friend who lived in New York. Her parents were very supportive, and as she puts it, “put up with her wackiness and tried to corral her in a way that she could deal with.” They found another college, Friends World College, with campuses in New York City and East Africa, among other locations. She worked at a theatre in New York City through a work-study program, and decided she wanted to go into performing arts. She also worked in Cambridge, Massachusetts at a community center that was in a lower socio-economic area, and she enjoyed helping bring the arts to this area in the hopes of engaging people and making them feel good about themselves. She loved the arts and never intended to become a teacher, even though her family had a multi-generational history of teachers. After Cambridge, she went to Kenya and Nigeria to work with dance troops. In Kenya, she met her future husband who was in the Peace Corps.
In Africa, she taught dance and other subjects. She then decided that it was her “calling” to become a special education teacher. She and her fiancée came back to the States and got married. She started to take some learning disabilities courses. Her husband got a job in St. Louis at a technical school and they lived there for three years. Some of his students were from Saudi Arabia and encouraged him to apply for a job there. They moved to Saudi Arabia and ended up staying for fourteen years. As her opportunities were limited since she was a female, she spent most of her time trying to learn about the language and culture on her own. She was eventually able to teach for six years in the British curriculum school her children attended. There she learned to start writing her own curriculum. By the time middle school was approaching for their oldest child, they decided to come back to the States for other opportunities and to be closer to family and ended up in Springfield, Missouri.
At first, Mrs. Gilpin taught computers at various elementary schools and then art and music. She began working on her masters in gifted education at Drury University when Dr. Linda Crowder approached her and asked her if she ever thought about teaching gifted children. She got certified in gifted education and started at WINGS in 1998 teaching middle school. Then, she taught sixth grade at the Central Scholars Program. After that, she went back to teaching at WINGS, teaching many grades, but finally ending up teaching fifth grade. WINGS was an amazing program for her to teach in as she loved educating gifted children. She said, “it was a delight, working with all these fine minds.” In WINGS, there are “major units,” classes students can sign up for that center around a certain subject or theme for a semester. Mrs. Gilpin taught many different units including: Mosaic (Building a Mosaic Out of Math); Think SMArt (Science, Math, and Art); Otaku (Japanese Arts); Africa; different Archeology units, and Around the World. She explained that she chose major units that integrated culture, arts and science. She enjoyed collaborating with other teachers and experts in the community.
Mrs. Gilpin’s kids loved WINGS as much as Mrs. Gilpin did. She loved how her son (both her children attended WINGS) described it as, “like a coffee shop where you can talk about really deep things.” She believes that all gifted children should have their quirkiness encouraged and should be taken seriously. Another major thing gifted children need to be taught is that it is okay not to know everything. Mrs. Gilpin really enjoyed teaching 4 different groups of students each week at WINGS as she felt she learned something new from their different styles and points of view.
Gifted education is extremely important to Mrs. Gilpin as she feels this program allows teachers to meet the student’s individual needs. She will miss her interactions with the students and all the research, creativity and coming up with ideas that was part of her job. She feels that she found what she loved to do and that working at WINGS was her dream job. Mrs. Gilpin’s retirement plans include: reading, gardening, traveling, volunteering, enjoying time with friends and family, trying new crafts and puzzles, and working on old ones.
Mrs. Gilpin is a dedicated teacher. She traveled the world and knows many languages aside from English including French, a little bit of Hebrew and Arabic, and some Kiswahili. She made a difference with her passion for learning and teaching, and she will be missed.
Elana Hadi is a 7th grader at Scholars. She loved her WINGS years and enjoyed interviewing her former teacher.