Nick Otten, CHS Associate Director of the Drama Department and former Honors American Literature teacher, shares his insights.

Q: How did you come to St. Louis?

A: My dad was a soldier in World War II. He got drafted and sent to Australia. He was 31. He met my mother, who was 19, and they got married. I was born two weeks before the Japanese surrendered. So then he got shipped home, and she and I went home on a troop ship, which was an old cruise ship that had been commandeered for use by the US Army. She said it was the best vacation of her life. 300 mothers and babies were there, and we went from Australia to Honolulu to San Francisco, and then took a train to St. Louis. I was six-months-old. I’ve lived here my whole life, but I was born in Australia. And my whole life I’ve thought, I’m kind of someone else.

Q: Where did you get your education?

A: I went to St. Louis University, then I went to Webster and got a Masters, and then I went to Middlebury and got a second Masters. At Webster, it was an education degree. It’s called an MAT: Masters in the Art of Teaching.

Q: How does Clayton compare to other high schools?

A:  I have worked in four schools. One was private, and it was my alma mater, so I saw it from both sides of the desk. And for 35 years or so, I was teaching teachers from all over the metro area. And I am here to tell you, this place is good. It is a fabulous school. I don’t think there’s a better high school in the metro area. Think about how many people you know who move to Clayton, put their kids through Clayton schools and then when their kids leave, they leave. That says a whole bunch. I adore the conference schedule. That’s often on the table when someone wants to do cost cutting. That was put in in the mid to late 60’s. In effect, you get two English courses simultaneously.

There was always this running talk about whether we should do [open campus]. At the time it was put in here, this is just a guess, but there were probably 25 or 50 public schools that had open campus. But one by one, they shut it down. But I think open campus is the reason that kids here really learn to schedule their own time. There are kids who don’t even learn that in college. So the result it, you learn, in many ways, the best of what college has to offer without all the craziness.

Q: Why do people call you Papa O?

A: I was the only one teaching HAL for about three or four years. I had a class that I was really close to, and there was a girl named Rachel Smith. She started calling me Papa, and then they’d call me Papa O. I was too old for any of this nickname stuff, but then she and her classmates who were in productions here were doing it at rehearsal. And when they left, Rachel’s younger sister, Miriah, kept doing it. And somehow it stuck! And I thought, that’s okay, it’s kind of a grandpa thing.

Q: Tell us a little about your teaching career.

A: I was teaching in Riverview Gardens in St. Louis. I was literally teaching the brothers and sisters of kids I grew up with. I wound up teaching some kids that no one else would teach because they had children or had been to jail. Nobody wanted to teach them, so I said, “I’ll do it.” But I wanted to go back to school and try to figure out how to teach these kids how to read. I decided, I am going to make 180 one-hour stand-alone lessons. And if they show up that day, they’ll learn something and they haven’t been failed by me. So I set out to make my lessons and when I finished I had 175 stand-alone lessons.

But I wound up at SLUH, my alma matter, and I had all of these lessons in my pocket for kids that can’t read. What it amounted to was a series of communications lessons, because what I was really teaching them was how to learn. They had this really odd humanities program at SLUH for 9th graders, and I said, “Can I teach a communications course?” And they said okay. So I taught it inside of the humanities program, and I called it “Communicating the Humanities” and it changed the way I taught forever. I made it into an environment where they could simultaneously learn what I call school skills – annotating, taking notes, memorizing – and baseline communication skills. It completely rearranged my philosophy of how I learned things.

From SLUH I wrote a book about that course. Couldn’t sell it, but I’ve used it over and over. I was teaching part time at Webster University, and I would just pitch courses to teach and they always said no, until in ‘75 when they finally said yes. I taught a course called “Ways of Seeing.” I would teach Thursday nights from five to nine. I taught a different way of seeing each night. So one night I would teach Journalism, and another night I would teach Japanese water colors, and one night I would teach male gaze and female gaze, and one night I would teach photography. I was just having the time of my life, I adored it. I taught there 35, 36, 37 years. I needed a full-time job because we were going to have a baby, so I wounded up at Parkway South until ‘85. I had people asking me to come to Clayton, and I thought, ‘Clayton doesn’t need me.’ We had moved to Clayton to put our daughter in Clayton Schools. And I would come home from teaching at Parkway South and be so tired. One day I thought, what am I doing? So I started here in fall of ‘85. I retired after 20 years on the button and I never left.

Q: After you retired from teaching English, what brought you into the theatre department?

A: Kelly had been asking me to read some scripts and asked me if I thought certain things would get her in trouble. We became friends, and I then became associate director of the drama department. What that means is I help her with whatever she needs. So that’s my job now, which I adore. I do not have to grade, and I basically stay out of the way. I like to think my job is to help people who want it, and if they dont I leave them alone. I believe that there are kids who are in productions who think, “What does he do?” But for people who want some help, I can give them whatever they want.