This week’s Project 100+ memory comes from Zachary Baer.  He was born and raised in Gibbsboro, New Jersey.  His father is a mechanical engineer who works in Pitman.  His mother is a secretary, always working in various churches.  He has an older brother and a younger brother, who graduated from Rowan University in 2022 with a degree in exercise science.  He attended public schools and graduated from Eastern High School in 2013.  He enrolled at Rowan University that same Fall, and he graduated four years later, in 2017, with majors in history and secondary education.  He was offered a position teaching history at Shawnee High School in the summer of 2017 after having been a student teacher there.  He is currently in the middle of his seventh year at Shawnee, where he has taught United States history at all levels and Advanced Placement Government and Politics.  He has been a class advisor in the past, and he continues to run both the Model United Nations team and the Debate team.  He also coaches track in the Spring. In 2022, Shawnee High School named him Teacher of the Year.

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The decision to enroll at Rowan was easy for me.  Three factors stood in Rowan’s favor. First, I knew that I wanted to be a teacher from an early age.  I knew that Rowan had a good reputation for training teachers.  A second important factor was that it was affordable for my family.  Unlike other colleges I might have attended, I knew that I could emerge with very little debt if I went to Rowan.  Third, I had a great visit to campus when I met Dr. Carrigan and learned about the CLIO program.  That program was very appealing to me, and I also was quite attracted to the fact that the Department of History had a five-year program where one could get both the BA and the MA in History.  I ended up not completing that fifth year, but the possibility of the program was important to me when I was considering colleges. 

College was a positive jump for me.  Even though there was more work required of me than in high school, I was learning about topics that interested me.  The professors made me feel very welcome and comfortable right from the beginning. Additionally, I got to make many new friends through the CLIO program, since we all took the same classes together. I am still friends with many of my classmates.

During my first year, two professors stood out to me.  One was you, Dr. Carrigan.  I had you for United States History to 1865 as part of the CLIO program.  That course was taught in a different way from all other US history courses that I had ever had.  We read primary sources that were new and fresh to me. They gave us eye-witness accounts of the past. We also read challenging and engaging books and articles that exposed us to recent scholarship and new ways of seeing American history.  The other professor was Dr. Scott Morschauser.  His Western Civilization to 1660 course opened me up to a world that I had never explored before.  He taught the class in a story-telling method and brought in many personal connections to the history, helping it come alive in our minds.  His ability to compose hieroglyphics on the board is something I will never forget!

As a commuting student, the CLIO program helped me fit right in from the beginning, but I also found other ways to be involved on campus.  During my first year, I joined the staff of the Whit and wrote consistently for the school newspaper all the way until I had to do my student teaching. One of the reasons that I did this was because my mentor, Dr. Carrigan, told me that the way to become a better writer was to write as often as possible.  I mostly wrote articles on education, but one of my favorites was an interview that I did with Ken Lacovara, who had been recently hired to return to his alma matter as Dean and had given a TED talk related to his discovery of the world’s largest dinosaur.

During my junior year, I took a British history course with Dr. Stephen Hague.  I expressed to him a general desire to study abroad, something that Dr. Carrigan had encouraged us all to consider in my first year. Dr. Hague helped make this happen by recommending that I consider a new exchange program with the University of Kent in Britain.  It was hard for me to do this with my education degree, but we figured it out.  I studied there in the Fall of my senior year.  The plane trip to London was the first time that I had ever left the United States.  My study abroad experiences greatly expanded how I saw the world, exposing me to so many ways of seeing the globe.  Kent was a very diverse University, and there were students from all over the world.  Of the five or so students in my hall, one was from Germany, one was Spain, and one was from China.  Everyone but me could speak multiple languages.  Another great experience at Kent was taking an American history class with students from all over the world.  The professor had the tall task of trying to explain United States history to a room full of students who had often never heard of figures like Benjamin Franklin.  In any event, I enjoyed seeing and learning about American history through this British lens.  I encourage all students to study abroad, and I now lead high school trips abroad.

During the summer between my junior and senior years, I took my first graduate class, the History of New Jersey with Dr. Carrigan.  I had become very interested in local history, and the class was a perfect fit for this newfound passion.  I find local history so fascinating because I think it is the best way to understand the impact and significance of the broader national and global themes on everyday people. As such, Dr. Carrigan’s class was phenomenal, and I wish more students could take a course on the history of New Jersey. I chose to do a research paper for my final project, and I chose a New Jersey Supreme Court case from 1884.  The case involved a Burlington, New Jersey minister in the African Methodist Church (AME) named Jeremiah H. Pierce. Pierce sued the Burlington school board after the school trustees mandated that his children attend a segregated Black school, despite the presence of a white school that was near the Pierce residence.  The New Jersey Supreme Court ruled in Pierce’s favor, permitting Pierce’s children to attend the all-white school. Unfortunately, Burlington schools, like almost all public schools in New Jersey, remained segregated until the mid-twentieth century. Nationwide, schools remained segregated until the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision, which in many ways mirrored the Pierce case 70 years earlier. Researching and writing this paper felt important, because it was a story that has been totally lost in the historical record. I will never forget discovering a pamphlet in Rutger’s Special Collections published by those in support of Pierce, which quoted why he took up the case, stating that Pierce wanted “to show the importance of standing up for our rights as citizens.” I found this to be a totally relevant message to the current political climate of the time. Pierce’s victory was hard-fought, representing a level of activism that deserves attention by historians, so I submitted my paper to a journal at Stockton University. A few weeks later, I was happy to learn that they would publish the article, which they eventually did in the fall of 2017 in their publication titled SoJourn.

As my passion for local New Jersey history grew, so did my passion for teaching. The hardest thing that I had to do at Rowan was student teaching.  It was challenging for multiple reasons. First, of course, I had to create lessons for my classes every day.  I was learning how to teach, which one really only learns by doing.  Second, I was taking a graduate class with Dr. Janet Lindman at the same time.  Not only did this take up an evening, but there was always a book or so to read each week.  The work ethic that I built to get through that semester served me very well in my first three years of teaching. Becoming a teacher was one of the best decisions I have made in my life – it is an incredibly rewarding career. 

Rowan provided me with the foundational skills that I would later need as an educator.  When I began at Rowan, I didn’t have a tremendous amount of self-confidence.  When I graduated, I felt much better about myself and what I could achieve.  This was because my professors had seen my potential, encouraged me, and supported me as I grew as a student.  As I have mentioned, the work load at Rowan forced me to develop a strong work ethic and to be able to handle the great pressures that descend upon all young teachers.  My time at Rowan also opened me up to a world of learning.  I had grown up in a small town, and I never really seen what lifelong learning could be.  After I graduated, I knew that I would always be reading, researching, and writing for the rest of my life. I ended up going back to Rowan a few years later, completing a master’s degree in special education. Currently, I am enrolled at Villanova University working on a master’s in history. None of this would have been possible without my incredibly supportive family, friends, and teachers that continue to inspire me to this day. 

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This is part of the Department of History’s “Project 100+,” an ongoing collection of memories by Glassboro State College and Rowan University alumni and staff that began as part of the celebration of the 100^th anniversary of the founding of Glassboro Normal School, later Glassboro State College, and now Rowan University.  Due to interest in the project, the number of interviewees continues to grow.  Thanks to Laurie Lahey for helping proofread and edit the final versions.  Email carrigan@rowan.edu with questions or corrections.  You can find the Link to all of the Project 100 and Project 100+ entries on the Web:  https://chss.rowan.edu/departments/history/alumni_highlights/project_100/