Thornton Academy Postscripts Alumni Magazine Summer 2007 | Page 3

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Queally Takes a Bow, Reflects on Career
English teacher
served as department
chair, union rep and
theater guru
In the days leading up to
graduation, Thornton Academy
English department chair and
teacher Chris Queally admits he
tried not to look at the calendar.
But because he teaches seniors,
and seniors have a different endof-the-year calendar than the rest
of Thornton’s students, constant
reminders were unavoidable in
the weeks dwindling down to
year’s end.
This year marks the end of a
33-year teaching career for Queally, 31 of which were at Thornton.
He came to Maine in 1975 after
spending two years teaching special education in New York City.
“I was teaching in New York,
and we would come up on vacations and holidays, and I would
put resumes around,” says
Queally. “I remember dropping
a resume off here and meeting
Jeannie Callahan, who had me
fill out an application. But for
whatever reason, I didn’t get a
call for a year and a half.” That
fateful call, which came in late
August following the resignation
of another teacher, would change
Queally’s life in more ways than
one.
“My daughter at the time was
five and getting ready to go to
school,” he says. “I just thought
that as a teacher in New York
City, I wouldn’t be able to afford
to live the way I wanted to and
take care of my family the way I
wanted to. And the move turned
out to be great for us.”
It was great for Thornton, too.
During his years of service at TA,
Queally has taught students in all
genres of English literature and
composition during the regular academic year and summer
school, and he is credited with
establishing Thornton’s evening
poetry class for students. He has

served as a class advisor, student
council advisor, active union
officer and representative, and
mentor to younger teachers and
theater directors.
His dedication to his students
and to teaching has not gone unnoticed: In 1996, the American
Teacher Awards recognized his
talents by naming Queally one of
36 outstanding Teachers of the
Year. Additionally, in 1999, the
American Council for International Education chose Queally to
participate in the United States—
Newly Independent States Awards
for Excellence in Teaching.
But Queally’s most visible
contributions to Thornton, perhaps, have been on the stage. As
a teacher and director, he has
provided countless venues for
students to be successful.
Since reinstating Thornton’s
Drama Club in 1985, Queally has
brought more than 50 theatrical productions as a director or
theatrical consultant to the stage,
including directing 10 musicals,
several one-acts and seven fulllength productions.
Always the Shakespeare
scholar (he spent a brief sabbatical at the Shakespeare Institute
in Stratford, England), Queally
also has directed 10 Shakespeare
plays, including collaborations
with drama teachers Bill Ouellette, Joshua Chenard ‘95 and
David Hanright.
Perhaps the greatest gift that
students have given Queally in
return for his hard work, he says,
are patience, tolerance, an understanding that a student is a
valuable individual with a unique
story to tell, and the wisdom
never to assume anything.
“As teachers, we have to
remember how human they are,
how different each of them is,
and that they have whole lives
outside of here that we don’t
know much about,” he says. “I always like to remember that while
there are lots of students who go
home to a place that is nice and

Photo by Lynn G. Novak

Chris Queally, shown here at a spring retirement celebration, taught for 31
years at Thornton Academy.

warm, with two cats and a bed,
a desk, a computer, a dictionary,
newspaper subscriptions and
people who care about what they
do who are educated and literate themselves, there are other
students who don’t go home. For
them, home is a back seat of a
car, or a couch they are surfing
in somebody else’s home, or it’s
complete chaos where people
are struggling so much to make
ends meet or are victims of addiction of abuse themselves. Not
everybody goes home to the ideal
Wally Beaver home. And when
we expect the same thing from
everybody, that every student has
to come in with their homework
done and everybody has been
able to do the homework and
have someone help them with it
or look at it, that is not realistic.”
With the final act of his teaching performance complete, Queally isn’t quite
ready to take a
bow. While he
may be retiring
from his day
job, he plans to
come back next
year to work
with Hanright
on another
Shakespeare
production.
He also plans
to complete
several instructional podcasts
on Hamlet for
his colleagues
in the English
department to
use.

In addiPhoto by Lynn G. Novak tion to traveling with his
Thornton Academy staff and faculty were encouraged to wear a sports coat pa