A Conversation with Dr. Payne

From Florida to the UK to North Carolina, she’s one of BISC’s newest teachers.

Dr. Payne is making a name for herself as an indispensable part of the school. We sat down with her to talk teaching, English literature, hobbies, and more.

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Where did you grow up?

I grew up in Coral Gables, Florida. It's a town just outside of Miami. It was sort of a nice childhood because you're outside all the time, and the beaches are there, and we could ride our bikes to school.

Where did you go to college?

I fell in love with English literature in high school, where I had an English teacher who I found really inspiring. The idea that words have so many layers of meanings was something that really interested me. So, I ended up going to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and I majored in English literature with a minor in psychology. My first year there was Michael Jordan’s last year there, for basketball (that’s how old I am), but it was it was a really fun place to go to school. It was academically challenging, because I was in the honors program there, and so you had small classes, and that part of the college experience allowed me to dive deeply into these interests that I had. But it was also a pretty fun college experience because of the basketball and the football and the beautiful area that it was located. So, it was it was great!

What are your hobbies?

Reading books, obviously. I will be honest that my hobbies when I was younger are different than now. When I was younger, I liked adventure and I was a big scuba diver, and I've bungee jumped and I've skydived. At one point after I finished my PhD, I backpacked for a year. It was when you could buy a plane ticket that connected you to a whole bunch of different airlines. You picked your direction, and my direction was east, and as long as you kept heading east, you had one year to take as many fights as you wanted. You’re traveling really cheaply; you’re eating street food and you’re staying in hostels. That was one of the things that reinforced the power of stories, because that's sort of how you engage with people that you meet. You learn their story and you tell them your story.

I don't do those adventures anymore, I don't know if you grow out of them, or I think maybe once I had kids, you sort of felt like people were depending on you. I love walking. I love visiting big cities but also country walks, but I don’t love the suburbs, it’s just not quite as interesting. Cycling, too, that’s probably left over from my Florida days.

I prefer small groups of interesting conversation over big parties, like the idea of sitting in a coffee shop with an old friend. I don't want to get too gendered here, but it is partly the way I grew up, but I also feel like there's a real value in building communities where you feel connected to these people but they also challenge you on your ideas. I found that a lot with groups of women who were also raising children at the time, because you could sort of share issues and problems. It’s not that the men didn’t understand, it’s just a different company, and so I call it solving the world’s problems over the washing line. Which is sort of an archaic saying but it's the idea of is how important it is for all of us to find those communities, whatever they are, that allow us to both feel safe and connected, but also challenged.

As the only American teacher in Upper School, what are your favorite and least favorite things about the UK?

I would say my favorite things are their sense of history and adaptability. The idea that there’s Roman roads there from the 300s, and the fact that they have this long history, there’s a sense of their place in time and I think it makes them very good conversationalists. And I love their sense of humor.

The thing that I would say I like the least, and I’m speaking more, I think, about my students, is that they didn’t all have big dreams for themselves. I don’t know if that’s an American thing, ‘work hard and this is available to you’, but there was this sense that ‘this is OK’. And maybe this comes from that humility that comes with the Brits. I think I would’ve liked my students to have bigger dreams for themselves.

If you had a locker, how would you decorate it?

I have a quote book, and every time I read a book if there’s just one little line, I steal it out and I put it in. It’s big and it’s from all these random books that I’ve read in my whole life, and it’s so funny to go back and read because sometimes it captures the mental place I was in at the time I was reading that book. So, I’d probably have quotations from my quote book. I’d have photographs, probably of my kids, just because. I’d try to pick photographs that capture them, not a big formal one. I have a different favorite color on different days, and so I’d probably have different color papers in the back and whatever color I felt like was going to be my color that day, that’s the paper I would put. I don’t love pastel colors, but I like the deeper colors. If it wasn’t so dark, I’d want a plant in there. Maybe a fake plant.

Did you always want to become a teacher?

I didn’t think so. I majored in English, and come from a family of lawyers, who always told me that I was a really good arguer and that I was going to be a lawyer, so I applied to law school and got in. During my senior year of college, my high school English teacher called me in March, because one of her teachers was going on maternity leave. She asked if I wanted to come to be a substitute teacher, and so I said sure! My idea was that I would work from March until June when school got out, and I would have earned money, and I could travel during the summer instead of having to work. Then, the teacher who went on maternity leave decided to take the whole next year off.

So, I deferred law school for a year, and then, that was it. I feel in love with it. And honestly, I’ve never regretted it, because every year is different. Teachers are really nice people, so no matter what school I work at, you always meet people that are kind, supportive, friendly, helpful, and interesting. And teenagers are funny. Every day I go home and I have great stories to tell at the dinner table. You get paid for reading books. It’s good.

What does English literature mean to you?

This is going to sound really grand. I really do believe that there is something, I don’t know what it is, and religious people would give it the name of God or Yahweh, or if you’re transcendentalist, you might call it the Over-soul. I don’t know what the name would be, but I really do believe that there is something that connects all of us, all of humanity.

I feel like English literature and those stories are proof of that. The fact that Hamlet is asking questions about what it means to be human, in his ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy, those are the questions we have, this many years later, in Charlotte, North Carolina. Those stories that are told from all different continents and centuries and genders and races and cultures, are our human stories. And I’ve read bad books, but there’s always something in there that adds to that big human narrative.

What’s your favorite book of all time and why?

Ohh, I can’t. I can’t. My favorite book tends to be the one I’m reading at the time. Right now, I’m reading a book by a guy called Wally Lamb, that is entitled ‘I Know This Much Is True’. It’s been on my shelf for a really long time, but it’s like a 1,000-page book. So, I kept putting it off and putting it off because I needed time. On the Panama trip, I thought I’d be on planes a lot so I thought this is my time to read it. And it’s good, it’s sad. It’s about twin brothers, beautifully written, who had a difficult childhood. One of them ends up finding out as an adult that he’s got schizophrenia, so he’s in a mental hospital, and it’s about their relationship. I’m going to finish it this weekend. It’s one of those where I know it’s going to be sad when I finish it, so I just slow down a little bit, I’ve to get to that at a time when I’m ready for it.

What do you want to be known for?

I think, maybe, someone who is curious and always open to change and growth.

College application season is ramping up for our seniors right now. What advice would you have for them?

I’ll be honest, I didn’t go through the process of choosing that I asked my own kids to. I wish I was more reflective; I think that you all are so much more self-reflective than I was when I was your age. The things that I ask my own kids are: What do you want out of college? What’s your most important thing?

If you were designing a college course, what would it be about?

It would be entitled: The Good Life. It would be a survey of literature, philosophy, and psychology, from the beginnings of human civilization. We would look at what would have defined ‘the good life’, which is a quote from Aristotle, which is all about how to live with virtue. Different types of societies in different time periods value different things. It would be in the hope that by the end, every student would know what ‘the good life’ was for them.

If one state in the USA needed to go, which one would you pick?

That’s so mean. That’s so mean. Oh my gosh. This is terrible. I don’t know, Kansas. I think the only reason why, and this is my own ignorance, but to me, nothing comes to mind when I think of it. I think I’d pick a state that didn’t resonate with something resonate individually to me.

Out of all of the places you’ve lived, which one is your favorite? (If it’s not here, we won’t be mad.)

No, I think I am going to say Charlotte. Because, honestly, if you think about it, it’s sorta perfect.