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Ask Ms. Robyn is the essential guide for parents navigating the transition of their children from high school to college and career. Host Robyn Hadley interviews experts and families, offering practical advice on everything from securing financial aid and understanding the importance of GPA and transcripts to building a strong support team. Each episode helps you explore all viable post-secondary pathways—whether it's a four-year university, community college, or a trade apprenticeship—ensuring your student is prepared for a successful and economically secure future.
Presented by Robyn Hadley
Learn more at www.askmsrobyn.com
Hello and welcome back to Ask Ms. Robyn. That's at askmissRobyn.com. You can also find the podcast on Spotify and Apple, wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find us on Facebook and Instagram.
We welcome your visits and we hope you'll follow us. Today we have a special guest, Henry Faust. I call him Hank and I'll tell you why in just a minute.
He's a retired National Board Certified Spanish teacher from Chatham County's Northwood High School in Pittsburgh. As an African American male, he saw the classroom as a place he could mostly directly impact his students. He's active in many roles at his church, Maxwell Chapel AME Church and on the boards of the North Carolina Association of Student Councils, Chatham Habitat, the North Carolina Governor's School Foundation, UNC Carolina alumni, and the National Association for Student Activities, among others.
He served as a staff member at state and national student leadership camps and he has extensive experience in youth outreach development. He's coordinated presentations and orientations for superintendents, school board members, local school administrators, and activities advisors. He believes leaders can not only positively impact school culture but also acquire skills they can use in the future regardless of their life path.
He has been selected as the Chatham County Teacher of the Year on more than one occasion and I call him Hank because we are cousins. And he was a mentor for me in many of his academic pursuits, one of which was going to Governor's School, another of which was going to Chapel Hill. And so I was grateful for his mentorship and leadership in our family and I welcome him today so that you all, our listeners, can get some insight from him, particularly about leadership and service.
Again, he's been in schools for more than 30 years. He's been a student government advisor and mentored a lot of teachers as well as teenagers. And I invited him today to talk a little bit again about leadership and service and why that's important for our students, whether they're enlisting in the military, whether they're applying for scholarships to a four-year institution, whether they are going to become apprentices in a welding or machining operation.
Hank talked to us a little bit about leadership and service and how students can become engaged in those activities during high school and how parents can support them in doing that. Welcome. Well, thank you very much for the opportunity.
Yeah, my knowledge and my usefulness in learning how to mentor people during student activities grew over time. At first, I just started just you know advising a club and I began to watch my students and learn from them about the things they learned and how they translated those skills, which I was not necessarily actively teaching. They transferred those skills into all kinds of endeavors afterwards.
So, first of all, I am real adamant about talking not about what we call extracurricular activities but co-curricular because those activities can be used to teach a lot of skills that are taught in the classroom, but they become more real. So, I work mostly with student council, but I saw this applied to kids who were in the DECA club, kids who were in FFA, got incredible training, kids that were in the key clubs, the service organizations, even kids that were in like band and I would even go so far as to say the sports, even though sports to me is a different skill set, but I saw these students get involved in these activities and begin to understand the depth in which they could go in their leadership that it wasn't just putting on a dance, it wasn't just selling candy, it was planning, it was evaluating, communicating with people, setting goals, all those things took place in a skilled student activity. Those, all those dynamics would take place and again it was this idea that it just wasn't, those of us who really worked at it well didn't use it just to get the project completed, but we tried to teach the students how to employ those skills and one real goal of mine was always to teach the students so well that I had that eventually they would become the ones who would teach the younger students how to acquire these skills also.
So, what I'm hearing from you is that these are opportunities just not to tick off a box, which is what we often hear students talk about or admissions counselors at colleges or scholarship application readers talk about. You're not trying to get kids to tick off a box, you're getting young people to get a better understanding of communities they live in, get an understanding of their strengths and weaknesses, what are the skills they have, the skills they want to learn, and ultimately that these skills that they're learning and growing into are skills that can help them well after they graduate. Is that right? Correct, and I will say that for a lot of students it does begin with trying to tick off a vendor boxes.
They're trying to join everything they can because they think that's the way to build a resume. There's a little bit of logic behind that. I think it's wise for students to try different activities, try the arts, try the service, try the leadership, try the vocational, try some of those things to see where the interests really lie because a lot of them don't know what they can do until they've tried it.
I remember a young man who was in my class. He was a mediocre student. I was walking by the display case one day and there was like this art project.
It was a wonderful art project and I saw him later on. I can't remember his name now, but I said I'll use the name. I said, Joey, I didn't know you were an artist.
He said, I didn't either until I took art. So a lot of times when they haven't really tried things they don't know, but eventually what they need to do is try enough things, see where the interests lie, what they're good at, and then start to narrow the focus. I found when I was doing scholarship interviews, I was much more impressed by a kid who may have had at one point lots of activities, but then narrowed it down to two or three and then ran for offices in that area, headed projects in that area.
What I also looked for was that they talked about those projects and that organization in their essays. Then the advisor for that organization might also write the interview, so there was a story. They had, over the years, learned how to create their own story about what was important to them.
A lot of them, it takes them a while to find that, but I think we do them a disservice when we don't try to guide them toward being more focused in something that really is interesting to them, specifically to them and their talents. It doesn't have to be for a career goal at the beginning, just to see what they're good at. It's interesting that you mention that, because on another episode, Kim Davis, who's a school counselor, a social worker, was talking about the fact that our teenagers need us, that it's very easy to say, oh, they're in high school now, you know, they're 17 now, they should know how to do that.
Well, they really don't, and especially if they were in developmental stages during the pandemic, some of these skills we have to go back and really kind of help them with, excuse me, whether that's public speaking or presentations or just how to shake hands. It sounds like what you're talking about is relationships that you have been able to have over the years with students, but I think it can be hard sometimes for students and even parents to engage teachers like yourself to just introduce themselves, begin to kind of lay out what some of their aspirations might be. I know we're talking very broadly about leadership and service, but I'm also hopeful that with you as a guest and the decades of experience that you had in the school system, that you can help our parents understand how do you engage a teacher to take my child more seriously or to take me seriously if I'm not a parent who's able to show up all the time because I'm busy at work.
How do students and parents do that? What kind of tips can you give them? Well, I think you're right in that a lot of parents, when the kids, especially when they get to high school, do have that hands-off approach. We're going to let them fly on their own, and there's not necessarily anything wrong with thinking that philosophy, but just, first of all, I think the parents just need to continue to stay engaged, ask their students what's going on at school, what are you involved in, that kind of thing. I think one of the best things parents can do is show up whenever there's any kind of an opportunity, open house, things like that, just to introduce themselves.
Sometimes just seeing the name and the face is really what I need to kind of connect and what they need to connect also and for that student to see that the adults are engaged with each other. I would encourage them to look for any opportunity they can to volunteer. My students would, when we would plan a dance, they would kind of fight me about chaperones, and I would say, no, you're going to have some adults in this building, hopefully your parents, but if not, you know, if not your parents, the Aunt Susie down the road or somebody, but there are many opportunities during those activities to connect with the adults in the building.
Volunteering obviously is one of them. Even something as simple as, if I'm taking your child on a trip, bring them to school, you know, or at least talk to me, bring them to school, introduce yourself, so I know you, you know me. Even some simple things like that they can do, and even just an email every now and then just to introduce yourself and just ask, is there anything I can do to help you in the activities my child is in? I think that makes a huge difference in, first of all, me knowing who that parent is, but also in that child knowing that parent is going to still be involved.
I don't think it's one thing that they can do, but I think that they can just look for small things they can do. It's the same thing, I think, when we see parents just show up for the athletic events. I think it can be that simple also.
One of the things, kind of while we're on this topic, I'm wondering if you can give our parents and mentors some tips. We know that teachers, principals, school counselors, and other folks are really, really busy. They have pretty broad and deep to-do lists.
When parents and mentors engage a student, I'm sorry, engage a teacher that they think maybe is not being so helpful, any tips you can give parents about maybe how to more effectively engage with that teacher or administrator, or possibly even navigate around if you have to do that. We know that everybody has good days and bad days, but quite frankly, sometimes you just run into folks who are not as helpful maybe as they can be. As a parent or mentor, you've got to get the information for your teenager.
Any suggestions about how to do that as well? I think probably one of the simple things is to just ask questions. Can you explain to me how this works? What is this opportunity you're trying to give my child? How did you select kids for different things? Just ask me some real simple questions about that. I would even say you may want to try it first just via email, just because in some ways that's kind of less threatening.
It gives me a chance to kind of think through what I'm getting ready to say. There's also a record of it for one thing, but I will say you kind of mentioned the busy part. It's one of the issues that I had to kind of explain to some parents is because I got your email at 3 15 today, it doesn't mean I'm going to answer it at 3 30 or 4 o'clock.
It may take me a day to get around to it because one, I want to give you an answer. I want to give you a good answer. I want to rush through it.
I would say just asking questions would be a really good thing to do just about what's going on. I think it is a chance that you're right. Not every adult in the building is necessarily accessible, and so I would even say to try to find whatever adult that student is connected to.
There should be somebody in the building. Hopefully this is connected to me. We talked to them about it because they may have a perspective there also on what that other staff member is going through and why things may not seem as kosher as they should be, but I would look for if the person you're trying to get to is not necessarily receptive for whatever reason, and you may not know the reason, try to find somebody else on the staff who you can talk to and maybe they can give you the perspective you need also.
You know, I've had the opportunity to travel with you on a couple of field trips, work trips, and was with you in Michigan back in December when you won a national award, so you are doing things certainly well beyond, even in retirement, well beyond the state of North Carolina, and I'm wondering, I've also had the chance to see you at your holiday pancake breakfast and see students call you Senor Faust, your former Spanish students, and those former students bring their teenagers, so you have developed some long-standing relationships, and I'm sure it's pretty unusual also to have spent all that time at one school, and so I'm wondering if you could share with us what your former students tell you they learned from being in your class, being in clubs, what you advised as it related to additional skills that they needed to be successful in the world beyond making good grades. You know, at the end of the day, it's not just about the A's, it's again about these relationships, it's about the times that we failed when we were in high school, and we learned from those failures, or we had opportunities to engage with teachers like yourself or coaches or advisors. I'm wondering if you can share with our listeners what some of your alums have told you they learned from being one of your students or one of your student leaders.
Well, I will say several things and try to remember them all, hopefully I will forget them as I'm going through. A sense of responsibility that I have a job to do, and it's my job to make that happen. Really, one thing I tried to teach them is that, one, I can't be all 30-some of you in the student council or all 20-some in this class.
You've got a job to do. You signed up for this job, and so I need you to step up and do what you've got to do. That doesn't mean that you do everything perfectly, you know everything, so one of the things that I really encourage them to do is to ask questions, you know, to really to go back and be detail-oriented, to clarify what's going on.
If you get stuck, to come back to me again. I would often, often, I'm sorry to say, I would often give them responsibility, but what happened was I would really, they would take on responsibilities, and one of the things that we would do is we'd talk, we try to talk through what are the steps you've got to do. If you want to do this assembler, this dance, what are the things you have to do, date, time, elements of the program, line those things out, figure out what's got to be done, and then start assigning it to other people, which is what things you're going to do yourself.
That is a real skill that I've heard them over and over say that they've gone into situations in college, professional world, and they were able to sit in a room and hear this project proposal and break it down and make things happen, and they were told by their bosses, wow, you really were good at that, and sometimes they said the response was, I learned that in high school through student council. One of the things that happened, and this is a, this happened several times, is that the student was the one who initiated some of that practice. One of my student body presidents came to me one day, and she said, I'm going to have this meeting, and I want to make sure I've got everything covered, so can we just sit down, and you just walk me through the list of things I need to do, and I said, sure, that's fine.
This was very early in my career. She walked in, and she, I looked at the paper, she had this list of things that she was going to ask me. I had no list.
I thought we was going to have a conversation. She was ticking things off this list, and I was like, oh my gosh, and so we started doing it on a regular basis, and so I started making a list too, and after that, after she started doing that, we made that a regular thing, and then after every president, after that, that became a requirement. You have to come to me.
We're going to have a meeting. You should write down all the things that you need to get done, or you have questions about. I will then have a list also.
As you're going through, I'm checking off my list, so by the end, when you finish your list, I will cover anything you did not cover, and I said by the end of the year, when you finish your list, my list should be finished too, so they learn how to think through things, and how to project what needs to be done, and how to ask questions. It eventually became something that all of us did, every officer, and I remember having a kid who came to Carolina, and he was working. He got a job in the, I can't remember the exact name of it, but it's the CHEOPS program, I think, that did upper bound, all those kind of things, and he said a boss asked him, said, Derek, I want you to come in.
We're going to do a little job review. Derek walked in, sat down, and the boss said, well, anything you'd like to talk about, and Derek pulled out a list, and started going down the list of the boss. He said his boss just sat there, and he looked, he says, that's amazing.
Why did you do that? He said, I did that in high school all the time, so that's one of the things that really, that they told me over and over again, is just that attention to detail. Learning how to break things down was just crucial, and all kinds of things they did, and I remember one student who, she worked for a while, but then she eventually stopped working, and take care of her children, and she volunteered the PTA, and she revamped that. She told me how she revamped that PTA in order to make it a real functioning organization that was very supportive of the school, and that, to me, was one of those times where, yes, this is not just about a job skill.
It can be used in volunteering. It can be used in raising their children, too, how they learn how to think through things, and again, one of the smartest things I ever did was to watch my kids and think, what are they doing that's a little bit different? How do I capitalize on that? How do I make what they're doing a part of the process, and so I learned a lot from them, too. So Hank, I want our listeners to be very clear that what you're talking about really was on top of your job as a Spanish teacher.
You were teaching some of these things that you talk about during what I'll call your regular job, which was that of being a Spanish teacher or leading the Spanish department, but as a student advisor, you were doing a set of other things, which you may or may not have been paid extra for, shall we say, and so I think it's very important for parents and mentors to understand our school staff have a lot on their shoulders, but very frequently, you will have teachers who have a passion for this work like you do. Now, I took some notes there. You talked about how your alumni have told you they learned about responsibility.
They learned about delegating. They learned about organizing tasks. They learned about attention to detail, and they learned critical thinking, and I think that's important, I hope, for our listeners to understand that whatever your teenager decides to join, these are some basic skills you would want them to learn from that task.
Again, we don't want them just to tick the box, but we want them to join clubs or to be in clubs with advisors that have a similar skill set as Mr. Fowl, so they can learn more than just how to put on a school dance or more than how to give a speech or more than how to do a car wash or to set up a food bank. Let me add something else. They also had fun.
We had lots of fun. We traveled together a lot. We would do social things just to counsel.
We would have meetings. We also would go out to eat as a group sometimes, and I think that was just as important because it built that bond between them and between them and me that it was a personal endeavor. It wasn't just work.
We got to know each other better, and that was just a lot of fun. I will say one other thing about my job description and my work with student activities. I actually learned how to be a better teacher of student activities.
I was going to ask you about that. I took some of those things into the classroom. Every grading period, my students had to write down a self-evaluation.
I've been really good at volunteering. I need to do my homework better. They had to write down all these things and evaluate it themselves, and then I would respond, yes, you have.
No, you weren't that good, and so it was going back and forth, and I would tell them, you need to learn how to evaluate yourself before anybody else ever does, and I kind of got that. That was one of the things I took over from activities into the classroom, and at first, most of them just do not want to do it because they're just not used to looking at themselves and saying, I do well, I don't do well. By the end of the semester, they're writing like a page.
They're writing a whole, now I've got to read all these things, too. Yeah, but it gave them a chance to self-assess, and it gave them a chance to reflect. Unfortunately, we are coming.
We're kind of coming around for the last lap, if you will, of our discussion. There are two things I want to see if we have time to cover. One is that if I'm the parent or mentor of a ninth grader, help me understand the things I can do to support and encourage my ninth grader to put themselves out there as they describe it.
Find a club that does or doesn't work for them. I mean, the great part about being ninth graders is that if you don't like the club, you don't have to be in it the next year. You can find something else.
The second thing I wanted you to go over if we have enough time is many of these students that you're talking about, whether they're your Spanish class students or your student council students, they're going to come to you at the end or near the end of the school year or the beginning of that senior year and say, Senior Faust, will you do a letter of recommendation for me? And I'm guessing there's some key things you need from that student before you can either say yes, I'll write you a great letter of recommendation, or no, I'm not the best person to write that for you. So let's start with advice you would give parents or mentors, again, of those ninth graders. Students coming into high school that first year, they're not really sure kind of what they want to do.
Go to the open houses and all of these if you can. A lot of schools are doing the open houses and they're doing the activities with that, so I would definitely go to that. Also, I would ask around.
Ask neighbors, ask friends, ask other relatives who've been at that school or not even been in that school, but what kind of activities their kids got involved in and encourage the student to talk to them also. I think that that's probably a very much underused tactic. It's just, just get the lay of the land from other people who've already been through this.
It's just a real simple thing to do. I would encourage them to go to websites, although I have found a lot of the school websites don't do a good job necessarily listing all the clubs and organizations. I'd also think back to when you were in high school.
What did you, what were you involved in? What did you wish you may have gotten involved in? I think that's a real key thing. Again, not trying to push your kid into something, but thinking and having that conversation. Why don't you try this organization? Why don't you try that? I think you made a very good point.
You know, try the organization. If it doesn't work out, be very respectful. Say to the advisor, hey, you know what, this is really not my thing.
I think I'm going to move on to something else. I had several kids who left student council. For whatever reason, they just left student council.
That's fine. Go to another organization. I think the other important point that you mentioned earlier, again about time management, is that in the 9th and 10th grade, those students are learning how to juggle all those classes, the more rigorous homework.
And again, having that club or volunteer activity is an outlet, and it's a lot of fun, and it helps them kind of grow into additional opportunities. Let's pivot really quickly, if we can, just to, again, those seniors coming through the door that last year of high school, or even now, I imagine some of your graduates come to you, even in retirement, and say, Mr. Faust, can you write a letter of recommendation for me? What makes you say yes, and what makes you say, no, I'm not the right person for that, if you ever do that? First of all, you're exactly right. Last week, I did a graduate school application for a guy who's like 38, and I did a full-bred application for a guy several months ago, so I thought it was going to stop.
It doesn't. I try to have a conversation about what is it they want, so I can understand what they're looking at, what they want me to talk about. I try to make sure they give me something, some kind of resume, some kind of fact sheet, so I know what I'm, I don't want to forget things, for one.
But I have told several of them, especially if I had them as freshmen, and I don't have them again, I don't see them again until they're seniors, or I see them, but I don't have them in class, I said, you need to make sure you have, one, somebody who's very recent, because if I'm saying ninth grade, and you're a senior, or you're in college, and there's nobody else that balances that out, you want to look at somebody else. I can maybe write the best letter, but somebody looking at that may say, it's been six years since you've had that kid, so I put that up, how long has it been, and am I the best person, am I the only one, and if I'm not the only one, what else is that other person talking about, because there's no need for both of us to cover the same thing, excuse me. And then, I do say, I do say some of them, I've had a couple I've had to say, like, you know, you weren't really the best kid in class, tell me what's changed since then, have a conversation with me, and sometimes they can do that, and they're like, here's where I've grown, and I'm like, okay, good, I can talk about that.
So, I think it's, don't just walk up to me and just hand me something, here are the letter of recommendation, we need to have at least a little bit of a conversation, so I know where I'm going with this. I've had a few where I wrote the letter, I'm like, I'm going to give you the letter, you tell me whether or not you think I need to send it, because I'm going to be honest about what you've done. Yeah, I don't think I'll stop there with that, but I do think that having that conversation is probably the best thing, not just, not me assuming anything, or them assuming anything about what the outcome might be of that request.
Mr. Henry Faust, thank you so much for being with us, for sharing that wisdom, more than 30 years in the public school teaching space, student leadership development space. I know there are hundreds, if not thousands of students in Chatham County and other places across this country that are grateful for the instruction that you have given them, not just to be great students, but to be really, really good and nice people. We thank you for coming and spending some time with us on Ask Ms. Robyn, and we'll see you in the future.
Best of luck. Thank you very much. Any former students, call me up.