Windham History teacher Terrence Christy has been ready to retire since turning 60, but every year he has succumbed to students’ pleas begging him to stay until they graduated. Now at age 66, Christy has finally decided to end his 18-year tenure at the high school.

“It will be a big loss for us,” Principal Deborah McAfee said of Christy’s retirement. “Terry is one of my best teachers, makes connections with kids, makes learning exciting for kids and has a passion about what he’s doing. He will be hard to replace.”

Terrence, or Terry, Christy started his teaching career in his hometown of South Portland. Fresh out of the University of Maine he became a history teacher at the junior high school there in 1961. History had been a difficult subject for him in his schooling, but always one he felt comfortable with. He loved investigating the history of things and says that he would have become an archaeologist, but figured it would take too long and didn’t have the desire to learn languages like Arcadian or Egyptian.

He taught at the junior high school for six years before becoming principal of the South Portland Memorial Middle School in 1967. In 1976, he took a break from education to go into business with his father building homes, condominums and apartments in the Greater Portland Area. When his father decided to retire in the early 80s, Christy began looking for a job in the school system again. He worked as the superintendent at Windham for one year and then got the itch to teach again. Shortly thereafter, he began teaching history at Windham High School.

For almost twenty years now, Christy has enjoyed teaching history to students at Windham High School and has make some history of his own with the students.

“I’m a people person. I’m a down-to-earth kind of individual. And I think most of the kids that had me in class would say that I respected them, they respected me, we were like family,” Chhristy said. “We always had fun in the class, but we learn while we’re doing it. I had a code we lived by: respect for each other, tolerance for one another.”

In addition to his teaching accolades, Christy is also a former coach of the Windham field hockey team.

“While I was superintendent, I had noticed that the girls field hockey team hadn’t won a game in three years, hadn’t scored a goal in two,” Christy said. “All my daughters had played field hockey at Bonny Eagle High School and went on to play in college, so I had just enough experience to be dangerous. So I figured ‘what the heck’. I applied for the job, got it and for those first two years I recruited right out of classroom. From there, we, over a nine year period, developed a junior varsity team, a roster of 25 kids on a varsity team and also middle school field hockey team. The Varsity team got to be strong competitors, moved from Class B to Class A. And that first year in Class A, we went 11 and four. Well, from there, the whole team went full board and I’d like to think it as one of the highlights of my time at Windham.”

Christy has no plans after he retires, but explains that he is the type of person who always has to be doing something. He describes himself as a “strong outdoorsman” who loves fly fishing, hunting, badmitton, chopping wood and working in his shop. Christy is also an avid stamp collector with about 15,000 first-day covers in his collection. First-day covers are special envelopes that are printed with the stamp on them when that stamp is first issued by the post office. Most of his collection is from the 1930s, though he does have a few that date as far back as the first World’s Fair in 1893.

Christy sees the role of the teacher in the classroom as a role of great importance and responsibility.

“The teacher for me has always been the critical part,” Christy said, “The teachers deal with the kids the majority of the time and the kids look up to the teachers. I enjoyed my time in the administration, but I always envied the person in the classroom, watching the kids grow. I catch them as a freshman here and I see them go in my Maine studies class and the difference that takes place in between makes me very happy. I can honestly say in all the years that I’ve been in Windham I haven’t felt that we’ve done a bad job in educating the kids for the future. They’ve been ready for college, they’ve been ready for work and ready for the service to some degree. And I have no regrets.”

Christy is not only a proud teacher, but a proud father and grandfather as well. He has three grown daughters (Julia, Karen, Andrea) and two grandchildren. He currently lives in Standish with his wife Kathryn, a former Bonny Eagle english teacher, and serves as the Standish Town Council’s chairman.

Windham History Teacher Terence Christy is retiring after 18 years in Windham and four decades in education.