Campus visitors and special programming bring to life “MLK Jr. and the Moral Imagery”
February 19, 2025
Meet Humanities Teaching Fellow and debate coach Trinette Hunter ASP’18
BY KRISTIN DUISBERG
When Trinette Hunter talks about her path to St. Paul’s School, it’s easy to see what makes the first year Humanities Teaching Fellow such a natural fit for the School’s interdisciplinary English, history and social sciences curriculum. Hunter’s face lights up as she speaks about the full-circle moments she’s experienced in her first months of teaching Humanities III, the interlinking layers of her life that she’s aware of as she balances teaching, coaching and advising with her own master’s degree studies through the University of Pennsylvania Boarding School Teaching Residency program. “I think coming back here is really important for me,” she says. “I feel like it was what I was meant to do.”
“Back” for Hunter means returning to the place where she spent two summers as a teaching intern for the Advanced Studies Program (ASP) — an immersive five-week taste of St. Paul’s for academically motivated New Hampshire public high school students — and attended the ASP as a student between her junior and senior years at nearby John Stark Regional High School. “I had taken a tour at St. Paul’s when I was in middle school, and I fell in love with the campus, but applying here wasn’t the right thing for me or my family at the time, and the summer program was the perfect way to have that experience,” she explains. It was during an ASP college fair that Hunter learned about Wellesley College, where she earned her degree in Africana Studies in December 2022, and through the experience of working with like minded students in her ASP Forbidden Fictions class that she solidified her own desire to teach.
The experience at the ASP of being pushed to read, and to read well, and to read these texts that were challenging both ideologically and literally — it was just incredibly cool.
— Trinette Hunter ASP’18, humanities teaching fellow
“When I was a little kid, I would always say I wanted to be a teacher, and then when I got older, I wasn’t sure if that was what I wanted to do,” Hunter says. “The experience at the ASP of being pushed to read, and to read well, and to read these texts that were challenging both ideologically and literally — it was just incredibly cool. And then there were the teaching interns, many of whom were SPS or ASP alums, and they were all so smart and I knew I wanted to be like them.”
After graduating from Wellesley, Hunter spent a year in California teaching at Carondelet High School, a private all-girls Catholic high school northeast of San Francisco, before feeling the pull to return to New Hampshire. As a first-year Fellow, Hunter teaches one section of Humanities III, the required two-credit humanities course taken by every Third Former, and serves as an adviser to the girls in Warren House. She also is one of the faculty coaches for students on the SPS debate team — a responsibility she describes as being very much in her wheelhouse.
“I didn’t do debate before this, but I’ve always been in academic clubs — quiz bowl was my thing; math team for a while — so this student population … this was me,” she says. “I’m learning from them what a good debate looks like and how to get them good feedback.” As confident a student as she is a teacher, Hunter describes filling in for a student during debate practice so she could understand the experience of being in a debate herself. “I was like, let me try this, because I’m coaching you and I’ve never done it before.”
