Dressed in a sharp suit and helping himself to some hot coffee from a cup emblazoned ‘Freudian Sips’ on a November morning, Dr Thomas Hawkins, Director, American School of Doha (ASD) appears at remarkable ease in his office that’s just as bright and spacious as the campus itself. Community sat down for a chat with Dr Hawkins.
Tell us briefly about your journey as an educator.
As one of 12 children, I grew up in a small farm in Minnesota. I went to a private school through eighth grade, then to public high school, and later to university where I became a teacher of English and Speech and a coach. I had taught for a few years in Minnesota when some of my friends, who had gone overseas to teach at international schools, returned and told me – ‘Tom, this is something you should really look into’. So, as a young teacher, I went to Stavanger American School in Norway in 1989. But since the school was downsizing because of falling oil prices, I was there for only a year.
The school’s head suggested that I consider getting into administration and coming back overseas. And that’s what I did. I went back to Minnesota, got another degree, returned to teaching there, and met my current wife Marcia Carlson. She, too, wanted to go overseas to teach. Once we got married, we moved to Tarsus American College in Southern Turkey and our oldest son Zachary was born there. We then moved back to the US. I finished my principal degree in educational policy in administration, and got my doctorate in International School Leadership. While in Minnesota, we had our second son Joseph. Then, we got the itch to return overseas. We went to Stavanger American School, and now I went in as the principal. In those four years there, we had two more children – Samuel and Gabrielle.
When Marcia and I got married, we saw this as an opportunity for us to give our kids something that we couldn’t have given them by staying in the US – an international education that allows them to study languages and understand people from other cultures and get a view of the world that is very different from the one that I had when I was growing up.
Our children have grown up all over the world, they speak many languages and they have friends from everywhere. We next moved to China, at the International School of Beijing. It was very similar to ASD in that it had the reputation as the school that everybody wanted to go to. As time went on, I moved into the role of Director of the entire school, like I am now, here at ASD. After eight years of a great life there, we decided to move to Belgium, and eventually to Qatar.

Looking back, how were your schooling years? Can you share some of your favourite memories or teachers?
My parents weren’t wealthy at all but they managed to send all of us 12 children to the private catholic school in Rosemont, Minnesota. Father Fury, who was the parish priest, would drive us to have all prayers memorised. That motivated me as a kid to delve into prayers and also my religion as well, given that I grew up in a catholic household. He challenged us to think deeply and consider vocations, into the priesthood, in particular.
I pursued priesthood for a while in college but that wasn’t for me. Sister Serena Humble was all of about four feet tall. She was absolutely delightful. She would bring this class of rowdy fifth grade boys to a standstill when she would say ‘You need to sit down’, even when we could all look over the top of her. My favourite teacher was Joanne Fryburg. An English teacher at Rosemont High School, she never married and gave all her energy and livelihood to all the kids at school. She taught almost every one of my brothers and sisters over those years. I remember she had an ability to instil a passion for English. That was one of the reasons I went into English as major in university. She had this wonderful sense of continuous learning. That’s the kind of person I want to be; somebody who continues to learn and instil a sense of wonder and awe and a desire to learn in all of our kids.

As an educator, what do you think is the real role of the teacher?
It’s actually part of the ASD mission statement – to educate and inspire. That’s because you can give the students all of the education but if you don’t inspire them to learn, it really doesn’t make a difference. So I think a teacher needs to first and foremost inspire kids to learn. It’s important for us educators to remember that we help kids feel like they can do things and build their self-esteem. I still coach soft ball and I love it because it gives me the opportunity to engage with kids on a very different level than as Director of the school. So for the girls soft ball team that I coach, I hope I am instilling a love of the game and instilling a belief that they can do anything.

Tell us about one of the more interesting initiatives you might have taken as an educator?
When I went back to Minnesota to teach at a public school, I started a class called ‘Literature for the ’90s’. A lot of these kids would struggle in a regular literature-based English course because they didn’t see it as being relevant to them. We read good, interesting literature, like The Things They Carried, which is a collection of linked short stories by Tim O’Brien, about a platoon of American soldiers in the Vietnam War. We were able to get O’Brien to come as a visiting author at the school, and these kids who were never going to college had gotten so enthralled with O’Brien’s short stories in this book that they were really eager to meet him. He came and talked to all of the classes. An interesting point was that O’Brien, the author, was in the Vietnam War, and one of his stories talks about how he went to the field there, recalling a terrible battle, and seeing, 20 years later, this guy standing there, and him thinking that maybe it was him he was across the battlefield from.
One of the things that struck these kids was – what was it like for him to go back to Vietnam with his daughter and show her this place? To this, O’Brien said, ‘I’m sorry son. I didn’t go back to Vietnam. I don’t have a daughter. That’s fiction.’ And it was heartbreaking for some of these kids. They felt a bit cheated.
But it was probably something that stuck with these kids that they were totally believing that this literature was something that happened to someone because it was so good and engaging. It was really kind of an eye-opening experience for the kids.
If I go back to what I hoped to be able to do, it is to inspire those kids to read literature, to learn, to grow as individuals, thinking about things and not just accepting them. And that’s more important now when kids are bombarded by social media and all things available to them. It’s important to be good, discerning critical thinkers, and not saying – Oh, it’s on the Internet… so it must be true.

In more than a year that you have been at the ASD as Director, how has your experience been?
It’s been very exciting. I feel very supported by the community, the board, the US embassy, parents, and our great staff (225 teachers and 160 support personnel). The focus of the ASD is to provide an American-based curricular education in an international environment. The challenge of that is that you are not an all-American faculty or student body. So you are taking the best of American education, transferring it here, and making it applicable to kids who will go off to all parts of the world.
Currently, we have 2250 students from 70 different nationalities. The parents truly believe that what we provide for them and their children is first-rate education in a great learning environment. I can’t tell you how many times I hear from parents – “Oh, my kids are so happy at ASD”. It’s fantastic. From my perspective, we want to make sure that we are delivering everything that they are expecting from us. We continue to try to get better as a school.