SEQUIM — History isn’t what it used to be, thanks to Tricia Billes.
This teacher introduces teens to the past not just through textbooks, but via interviews with community members.
And her students don’t just crank out papers; in many cases they produce documentary videos.
Billes, once “the goat lady” who raised goats and managed the Malibu Feed Bin near her home in Topanga Canyon, Calif., changed careers about 20 years ago.
She became a history teacher, though those two words don’t cover it.
Billes, 56, is the winner of the 2010 National History Day Walt Crowley Teacher of Merit award for Washington state.
Her prize is not cash, but instead a trip to Washington, D.C., in June, where she’ll be in the running for the national Teacher of Merit honor.
The award is named for the late creator of www.Historylink.org, a free online trove of Washington state history.
“It’s a super-cool Web site,” said Todd Beuke, who teaches history alongside Billes at Sequim Middle School.
He nominated Billes for the award after working with her for a decade.
“The thing that has made her great,” Beuke said, “is that she goes way over the top in a good way . . . she amazes me all the time,” with the way she guides students step by step through their research.
Billes and Beuke have been taking students to Washington, D.C., for the national History Day competition every year since 2002, and have watched some make it to the finals each time.
First, they go together to the regional competition at Olympic College in Bremerton; this year’s contest will be March 22.
In his nomination letter, Beuke noted that Billes has poured her own money into books, more books, a classroom computer and a video editing system for her eighth-graders.
Supporting the students
“I feel like I have to support my kids,” she said as students milled around her room after school on Wednesday.
“Not all of them have parents who can [buy books] for them.”
She’s built a library of several hundred volumes, as the young historians developed their research and critical thinking abilities.
Billes’ own children are grown, and she’s clearly reveling in her work with the young teenagers who are frantically finishing their projects for History Night, set from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday.
History Night
Some 400 students will display their History Day creations in the middle school gym, 301 W. Hendrickson Road.
For information about the event, phone the school at 360-582-3500.
While Billes loves the library that lines her classroom walls, she teaches far beyond books.
Her students learn to interview primary sources, including Jamestown S’Klallam tribal elders and other local people who lived the Peninsula’s history.
At History Night, her pupils’ research will be revealed, together with their discoveries that Washington’s past is peopled with inspirational men and women.
Billes also works with Sequim High School students on their History Day projects.
Five years ago, Billes’ own daughter Rosie, while a sophomore, completed a History Day project on the U.S. Army and Navy nurses who ministered to prisoners of war at Bataan and Corregidor in the Philippines during World War II.
She won ninth place in the nation — and then decided on a profession.
Now 22, Rosie will graduate this May with her nursing degree from Washington State University.
Billes herself has traveled a considerable distance from her first career working at that feed store in Southern California, where she said Henry Fonda came to buy fertilizer.
Travels in summer
After she takes her top students to the History Day contest held every June in College Park, Md., just outside Washington, D.C., she spends her summers on personal journeys into history, having won grants that help her travel to such places as Philadelphia (2009) and Berlin, Germany (2008).
Such travel “is very enriching,” she said.
Billes will be 56 on April 12 — the day, she reminds a reporter, when the Civil War started in 1861 and that President Franklin D. Roosevelt died in 1945.
Might she be thinking about retirement some time in the next few years?
“No,” Billes replies, shaking her head. “I love these kids. I love what I do; I find it very sustaining.
“The kids make me laugh . . . and they make me tear my hair out sometimes. But they are fabulous.”
And the students, overhearing that Mrs. Billes has received a state award for her teaching, applauded.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.