Sheri Steininger

When she is not working, she is going to alternative rock and country concerts. She is spending time with her kids. She is reading. She is writing. And she is making the most of her teaching experience.
After teaching English for 33 years, Sheri Steininger has made her mark on Clayton High School and even more so on her students.
Steininger has taught a variety of grades and courses, her favorite being Honors English I.
“It’s hard not to love Honors Freshman [English],” she said. “I love the seniors, I’ve always taught seniors but, in general they’re not happy unlike the freshmen who are still happy.”
Her ability to relate to and accept other human beings has only strengthened her teaching capabilities.
“We are all people,” Steininger said. “Here we are, with certain similarities: we are both St. Louisans and we are both Clayton people and we are both working toward this goal of making you a better reader or writer or both.”
Students and colleagues have connected with Steininger in many ways.
“She often gifts people books, that’s her thing,” English teacher Jennifer Sellenriek said. “It is kind of a combination of her generosity and her passion for reading through which she kind of tries to figure people out.”
The students notice this, too.
“[Mrs. Steininger] remembers the little things about her students’ lives,” senior Emma Marquis Kelly said. “She had my sister as well and she remembered some of my sister’s papers and even having her in class and her personality.”
“She’s always been very personal and upfront with her students,” senior Melissa Gastelum-Lopez, who has had Steininger as a teacher for three out of four years at CHS, said. “Which makes her a teacher that will always seem like a close friend or someone you can trust. She has never been a judgmental person and has always had a very positive attitude, unless it came to someone wearing perfume.”
Steineger has given countless hours to her career, often sacrificing time with friends for time grading papers and making sure her students are getting the devotion they deserve.

“She has integrity,” Sellenriek said. “I believe her values are really clear and really important to her. I think she understands the importance of holding high expectations of her students or her friends or her family or of the world. She has some pretty clear ideas of what she thinks is right and wrong in the world and I really admire her for that.”
Steineger honors the dedication her students put forth.
“To me the students have so many difficulties, so many challenges and here they are everyday they come in and they try to do their best,” Steininger said. “I think a lot of people are really brave.”
Often, Steininger learns of her students’ challenges through conferences.
“Most of [the students] want to get to know you as a person and they want to share themselves. I get the feeling that students don’t have much of an audience, people don’t really listen to them. I think sometimes they feel like they don’t have enough of their parents listening to them, so they want you to hear what they have to say.”
Steininger admits her own personal challenges of teaching. Despite how appreciative Steininger is of being able to teach at a prestigious school like Clayton, she has experienced the ramifications of such a rigorous workload.
“The hardest thing is that the job is never done. If you want to be really good at what you do, you can always think of a better way to do it, if you put in more time. And it’s a job that can swallow you whole if you’re not careful, and it happened to me,” she said.
Her efforts and self-discipline do not go unnoticed.
“When I think about [Ms. Steininger] I think about how she really values intellectual pursuit, that we are learning for learning’s sake and not for grades,” Sellenriek said.
Recognizing that there are students with low parental and financial support, Steininger makes it her mission to become a role model for those students and to lead them to realize their capabilities.
“What I try to do is show them that they can build their own support networks and learn from what they never had,” Steininger said. “I can make sure that in the future, they have a life that gives them what they need and provide for their kids in a better way.”

According to Steininger, she has found her sense of self in the classroom.
“I really appreciate Clayton High School for letting me be me, instead of pretending,” she said. “The first five years I taught in the room and pretended to be a teacher because I was a kid. I remember by about the third year one of my students said ‘You don’t even own any blue jeans, do you?’ And I thought, ‘I have succeeded, they believe I am an adult.’ But as I’ve gotten older I’ve gotten much more comfortable with just being who I am.”
Every year, Steininger looks forward to showing her students the art of annotating a poem.

“That sounds horrible, doesn’t it?” she said. “Except, when they do that they start to – and it takes a month for them to do this by themselves – realize that teachers are not just making all this stuff up, that poetry has deep meaning. And of course if you can read a poem and find the implications and the depth of theme and so on, you can read anything and see it, because it’s far harder to read poetry than anything else.”
Steininger has not just opened her students’ eyes to the world of possibilities when they annotate poems; she has shown them that there is more to anything than what they see on the surface. She has truly shown them the value of deep thinking.
English teacher Adam Dunsker notes that Steininger works towards improvement in her students’ writing.
“She pushes students to identify areas of their writing or thinking that they’d like to improve, and she then works with the student to tailor the next assignment to provide opportunity to do so,” Dunsker said.
Steininger has taught her students life skills.
“When I teach students argumentative techniques I always say, ‘In your marriage when you need X, you need to be able to express that and give reasons why. Let me give better examples to you: In your family now you would like these privileges and you need to be able to go to your parents and explain why.’”
She has high hopes for the Clayton community after she leaves.
“I hope that they discover that they can become better communicators, that it’s not just an assignment. It is very important to your life that you know how to communicate and to understand, for example, when you don’t actually make sense because young learners don’t understand when they don’t make sense,” she said. “So I hope that students take away that more than any other subject that we’re teaching, that communication is essential to everything that we do for the rest of our lives.”