Former students raise funds to create outdoor classroom honoring teacher Elvis Barrett

A fundraising drive is underway to create an outdoor classroom on the Gainesville School campus to honor a teacher described by many as one of Gainesville’s best – and most eccentric.

After Elvis Barrett died Aug. 12 at the Gainesville Health Care Center at the age of 86, his obituary, posted on the Ozark County Times Facebook page, generated dozens of appreciative comments and favorite memories shared by his former students in the biology, science, psychology, sociology and government classes he taught in Gainesville’s junior high and high school between 1978 and the late 1990s. The obituary was shared more than 90 times.

One of his students, Melissa Fenn Mahon, has launched a fundraiser on the gofundme.com website (search for Barrett’s Outdoor Classroom) with a $5,000 goal. Gainesville superintendent Justin Gilmore said Monday that donations may also be sent directly to the Gainesville R-V School District (422 Bulldog Drive, Gainesville, MO 65655). It’s essential that “Elvis Barrett memorial” be noted on the check’s memo line, Gilmore said, adding that he thinks the outdoor classroom is “a great idea.”

A gift for teaching

That idea was chosen because of Barrett’s well-known love of the outdoors, as well as his gift for teaching the sciences.

Mahon credits Barrett with fostering her own love for the sciences, a love that has led her to earn several nursing degrees, culminating last May in a doctorate in nursing practice. 

After she graduated from GHS in 1996 and took science classes in college, she said, “they would present something, and I was like, ‘I learned that already,’” she said last week in a phone call. 

“He made us learn, and we didn’t realize we were learning,” Mahon said. “He clicked with every single student, no matter where you were coming into his class. He could see you, understand you. Everyone truly respected him.”

Karla Gillespie Smith said, in a Facebook comment, said Barrett “knew how to put things in your head (as a junior high student that was no small task) and make those things stay.”

Another former student, Dustin Hudson, wrote that Barrett “opened my mind to compassion and understanding for the ones that were behind the scenes. . . He stood alone as a person that taught us kids what he thought would help us, regardless of what anyone else thought.”

Lisa Gunter McGowan recalled the bucket Barrett kept in his classroom. “He would have us put on pieces of paper subjects that we would be interested in learning/talking about. In class, while he was teaching and someone was bored with the subject, they could yell ‘bucket,’” she wrote in a Facebook post. 

Instead of being annoyed, that interruption would bring “a grin to Mr. Barrett’s face,” McGowan wrote. “He stopped what he was teaching, grabbed the bucket and drew out a subject. We would then talk about that subject. He was definitely the best teacher. They broke the mold with him.”

Barrett was “a prepper and a survivalist before that was a thing,” said former student Angela King MacLaughlin. His unconventional methods included using what she described as “butcher paper” instead of a chalkboard to present lessons and even to give tests. 

In his classroom he had wall-mounted rolls of wide paper that he would tear into banner-like pieces he hung around the room. On the paper, he would write the information he wanted his students to learn – and later he would write out test questions on the big paper, often featuring fill-in-the-blank sentences. Several students remembered that he even provided the first letter of the word that was to go in the blank. 

The method seems now to be one that would make test-taking super-simplified. But multiple students repeated that Barrett taught in a way that caused his students to remember what they learned in his classes.

Unorthodox and ‘weird-acting’ –  but beloved by his students 

Melanie DeWeese, a 1984 GHS grad who took Barrett’s classes in both junior high and high school and later worked with him as a fellow educator in Gainesville – and is now retired – said she could still remember specific science lessons she learned in his class.

“He had an unorthodox style of teaching that wouldn’t have worked for anyone else but him. . . . Everybody I know who had him as a teacher always remembers something from his class,” she said.

For example, DeWeese still  remembers the “mnemonic devices” Barrett used to help students remember things – like “Roy G. Biv” as the way to remember the colors of the spectrum (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet) and “Mary’s Violet Eyes Make John Stay Up Nights Proposing” for the order of the planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto).

After teaching high school business classes, DeWeese became the high school counselor, a role where she saw Barrett’s psychology and sociology classes regularly fill up with as many students as they could hold. “His classes were always full; they closed every year,” she said. “The kids absolutely loved him.”

Barrett’s unusual methods included showing the R-rated movie “Pink Floyd: The Wall” in his psychology class to teach students about the emotions surrounding isolation and alienation. 

Some of his former students remembered how Barrett responded one day when his fellow teacher Barbara Pettit had trouble with a student she had kicked out of her classroom across the hall. The student got belligerent; Pettit told the Times Monday. “He ran out of the classroom, and Elvis saw him running out and recognized that he had an angry look, and he tackled him there in the hall. He was protecting me.”

Pettit added that her own daughter was also a Barrett fan. “She said she would never have passed biology if it hadn’t been for him,” she said. “He did make his tests so easy, but he had a way with students and made them want to learn.”

Another fellow teacher, Wayman King, described Barrett as “a pretty smart dude.” He and Barrett ate lunch together most days at school, and King was familiar with Barrett’s survivalist mindset. 

“If there was a nuclear attack, he had a route mapped out to get to a safe place. He had an old Bronco, and then an old pickup. He carried all kinds of ropes and chains and everything else in there so he could survive anything,” King said. 

Barrett owned property in Douglas County, but he seemed to show little interest in it, King said. “Toward the end, he lived mostly in a little old camper trailer – looked like an egg going down the highway behind his pickup.”

Halbert Smith, who taught vo-ag at GHS while Barrett was there, said that, because Barrett was “weird-acting,” a lot of the other teachers didn’t talk with him much. “But I always did,” Smith said. 

Barrett taught a sex education section in his biology class, and one day, Smith asked him, out of curiosity, if he’d ever had anyone complain about it. 

“He said, yeah, he’d had a mother once who was mad because he had taught it at the end of the year, and she wished he’d taught it at the beginning because she had a daughter who’d gotten pregnant,” Smith said.

Barbara Luna, now retired, taught several years with Barrett, who she described as “a most unconventional teacher in looks and in techniques.” 

Luna said she always respected him as a teacher, even though “we definitely didn’t share the same teaching techniques.” Luna recalled that once when she was mentoring a new teacher, he asked to observe Barrett. “He said he had heard so much from students about his teaching he just had to see for himself,” she said. “Barrett had great success with students learning what he was teaching, sometimes because it was unorthodox but basically because he made it interesting, no matter the subject matter.”

A talent for remembering his students

In later years, Barrett showed a gift for remembering specific details about his former students’ talent and creativity. Both of Barbara Luna’s children took Barrett’s classes, and she remembers how, years after he had retired, she would run into him occasionally at the grocery store.  “He invariably remembered my children and mentioned that my daughter had the best book report he had ever read,” she said. 

Halbert Smith said Barrett “would tell me every time I saw him how, back when it was Spirit Week or something, the kids would dress up like teachers. One time my daughter Crystal dressed up in camo with her pant legs rolled up to look like Mr. Barrett. He was so thrilled that she did that, and wasn’t afraid to do it. I don’t know if she even had him as a teacher, but he mentioned it to me several times.”

Wayman King recalled how, whenever he encountered Barrett in later years, he would remember how King’s daughter (now Angela MacLaughlin) had taken his general science class as a senior. “Elvis said she basically taught that class,” King said. “He would say, ‘She knew more about science than I did.’”

“Even if he would see you years later, he seemed to always know who you were,” Melanie DeWeese said. “He had a teaching style that nobody else could have replicated. He was himself; he didn’t put on airs or care what others thought of him. He was just an amazing teacher.”