Terry Monette during a quiet moment in her busy fifth-grade math and science classroom. (Photo by Lisa Aciukewicz)

Terry Monette grew up the third of 10 children in Minnesota, where she enjoyed biking, swimming, canoeing, water skiing, sledding, and ice skating and joined glee club, drama productions, and Girl Scouts at school. In college, Monette and a friend hopped a freight train in Minnesota, rode it to Montana, and hitchhiked to Glacier Park. Once she also came eye-to-eye with a humpback whale when it surfaced beside her kayak. Raising a family and teaching fifth grade in Harvard for 20 years have not dimmed her spirit for adventure.

Monette met her husband, Dave Herbert, while on a five-week kayak expedition in the Prince William Sound of Alaska. “We commuted for a year between Connecticut and Minnesota to see each other, and then married and settled in Connecticut,” she says. “Our honeymoon was spent backpacking in the Bighorn Mountains, the Tetons, and the Wind River Range in Wyoming.” They settled in Groton and raised their son, Matt, a doctoral student at the Fletcher School of International Law and Diplomacy at Tufts, and their daughter, Cassie, a doctoral student studying political philosophy at Georgetown University. Her husband is retired from Westford Academy, where he taught French and Global Insights.

Monette interviewed for her Harvard position during a hurricane. “The storm didn’t scare me off,” she says. She recalls a science lesson during that first year. “All the kids were lined up, shoulder-to-shoulder in the front of the room, ready to launch the paper airplanes they had created,” she says. “There was a lot of excitement and the possibility of ensuing pandemonium. It must have turned out just fine, because that’s all I remember … that long line of eager fifth graders ready to launch their planes.”

That year she introduced the idea of attending Horizon for Youth (HFY), an environmental education center in Sharon. “I remember how excited I was when my fifth-grade colleagues Mitch Grosky, Scott Hoffman, and Chris Moeser agreed to take the fifth-graders on a four-day trip the following year,” she says. “Harvard’s elementary students have been attending HFY or Nature’s Classroom ever since. [It] makes such a big impact on the students’ lives.”

She and fourth-grade teacher Kathy Kittredge created the fourth- and fifth-grade Nashua River Watershed Project to help students get to know and understand the local watershed while developing inquiry-based learning skills. They also incorporated canoeing on the Squannacook and Nashua rivers and inquiry-based research at the river and on the school nature trail. Their projects earned them three awards: The Secretaries Award for Environmental Education, from the Executive Office of Education through the Commonwealth of Massachusetts; the Formal Environmental Educator Award from the New England Education Alliance; and the 2005 Environmental Education Award from the Nashua River Watershed Association.

“It’s been incredibly rewarding to have the support of parents for the Nashua River canoe trips and our weeklong trips to Nature’s Classroom,” she says. “Their commitment and dedication to these learning experiences has been amazing.”

Monette loves to watch students learn and grow socially and academically, to see their excitement when they find aquatic invertebrates in the Nashua River, to  witness the “aha” moment when long division suddenly makes sense, and to see the pride a student feels about spending five days away from home when they thought they couldn’t do it.

At home Monette is an amateur photographer, tends to vegetable and perennial gardens, and likes to take walks, attend plays and concerts, practice yoga, take cardio-kick classes, cross-country ski, and ice skate. She and Dave enjoy traveling to quiet, beautiful places where they hike, kayak, and tent-camp. When their children were young, they spent a year living in a suburb of France and camped in France, Italy, Switzerland, England, Scotland, and Wales. This past summer they camped in British Columbia, hiked in the Rocky Mountains, and kayaked off the coast of Victoria Island. They hope to zip-line over the rainforest in Costa Rica. Monette’s journey up mountains and rivers and into new countries and classrooms clearly fuels her spirit.

Suzanne Mahoney is interim principal of Hildreth Elementary School.