If it’s true that experience is the best teacher, then Freda Boyles must be at the top of her craft.
She started her career 56 years ago, in 1969, and has remained with Broward County Public Schools ever since.
“The very first year, I had a difficult time, I didn’t think the students really liked me and I wasn’t getting through to them,” Boyles said.
The entire nation was going through a difficult time. In the year in which she started her teaching career, the Vietnam War was raging. Woodstock became a symbol of music and protest. The Stonewall riots occurred, marking the beginning of the gay rights movement.
One massive event that awed the world also happened as the Apollo 11 mission successfully brought astronauts to the moon.
Locally, Broward County’s population was 620,000. Now it’s nearly 2 million people. Boyle was teaching through momentous times.
“Well, when I first started back in 1969 at Blanche Ely High School, we were a segregated school,” Boyle said.
A year later, Broward County Public Schools integrated, and Boyles was transferred to Northeast High School in Oakland Park.
“When I got there, you know, some students didn’t accept me, because, you know, I was a Black teacher and once they learned that I was an individual just like anyone else, then they accepted me and they learned from me,” Boyles explained.
That was a lesson at least as important as anything learned from a textbook.
“That helps them to learn that I need to accept an individual for who that individual happens to be,” Boyles said.
Of course, she’s seen history unfold, but it’s also mind-boggling to consider how much education itself has changed since Boyles started her career.
“I enjoy the challenge of the change that has occurred because when I first started teaching business education courses, we were teaching typewriters on a manual typewriter, we were teaching shorthand,” she said.
Does anyone remember shorthand?
Boyle is definitely not forgotten by her colleagues at the school at which she’s taught since 2001, Sheridan Technical High School and College. They know a treasured resource when they see one.
“It’s a legacy, it’s a testament to her dedication, to her willingness to change lives,” said Cara Daniel, the school’s director.
“They don’t treat me like the old lady!” Boyles said with a laugh.
She told us she’s still invigorated by the satisfaction of seeing students learn, and it all started with advice from her mother.
“When I think back over things, it was all divine intervention,” Boyles said with a tear in her eye, saying her career has been a tribute to her mom because her mother was never able to even finish high school.
The world changes, and Freda Boyles adapts and marches along, with no plans to retire.
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