“You’d be surprised at how similar the behavior of middle and high schoolers are,” said James Walsh, former social studies teacher here at WAHS, who returned to Western this year as an administrator.
Walsh, who is originally from Long Island, NY, moved to Midlothian, Richmond in 1998 at the age of 13. He grew up in Levittown, the first major suburb ever created after WWII. He attended Midlothian Middle School for eighth grade, and then proceeded to attend Midlothian High School. Because of the educational discrepancy, Walsh found himself struggling to keep up with his Richmond peers, and found himself in a culture that “was very Civil War Remembrance-y, like we got school off on Stonewall Jackson Day.”
He then attended J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College for two years before he transferred to Longwood University in Farmville, VA. “Attending community college made me a better four-year college student,” Walsh said. Walsh double-majored in history and secondary education, and decided to become a teacher in his senior year of high school because of some of his own exceptional high school teachers and after seeing his older sister, Joy, go through a similar process of becoming a Special Education teacher.
Walsh graduated from Longwood in the fall of 2008, and began working at Short Pump Middle School in Glen Allen. He taught “eighth grade Civics and Econ and then eighth grade honors World History I” as well as coaching “football and softball” and being the history department chair. He taught at Short Pump Middle School for seven years before coming to WAHS.
Walsh taught here at WAHS until the end of the 2021-2022 school year. He taught 9th grade World History 1, AP Government, and AVID. He said government was his favorite to teach: “I connected with the students a lot,” and “enjoyed preparing them for their next stage in life.”
A fond memory from his time previously teaching at WAHS was “a field trip the two days before Thanksgiving break where the students did a scavenger hunt of museum artifacts at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts based on the World History I and English 9 curriculum. We Zoomed (before we knew that Zoom would take over our lives four months later) with curators about different exhibits and how to analyze them.”
Another was during his last year in the classroom, when he taught “my cohort of AVID 12 kids that I taught all four years of high school, my last Model Congress working with Ms. Miracle and my Advanced Government kids, and lastly the year I taught the first ever African American history elective.” While Walsh “did not know it would be my last year in the classroom (2021/2022 school year), I have such great memories of the collaboration and partnerships that I had with my colleagues and the relationships I developed with my students. That last year was the reason I look back on my time in B204 with such fond memories and why I wanted to come back to WAHS when the AP position opened up.”
In 2022, Walsh “applied to any place close” after he couldn’t get into administration at WAHS. He began working at William Monroe Middle School as an assistant principal.
Walsh began working at Western again this year as an assistant principal. “The importance of administration is really on the macro level whereas teaching is on the micro level. Your job is to make sure that everything runs smoothly.”
