CSC graduate is Montana's teacher of the year

The honor is one of many that Gardiner has received during his action-packed life that has included international exploration and adventure as well as leadership in educational circles.

He received the latest award from the Montana Professional Teaching Foundation. He will represent the state at the National Teacher of the Year Convention in Dallas in January and be a guest at the White House along with the 49 other teachers of the year in April.

Gardiner is a 1972 graduate of Alliance High School and a 1977 graduate of Chadron State. He received the college’s Distinguished Young Alumni Award in 1989 and the Distinguished Alumni Award in May 2006.

Gardiner said he never expected to spend 29 years teaching English, particularly since it was among his least favorite subjects in high school. But at Chadron State, he found four professors who changed his thinking forever. He identified the professors as Dr. Dorset Graves, Dr. Duane Grimme, the late Dr. Shirley Morgan and the late Bernard Donohue.

“They gave me a love of reading, writing and publishing that has become my way of life,” Gardiner said. He has written four books and more than 500 articles that have been printed in magazines and newspapers.

Gardiner has received widespread attention for his advocacy of sustained silent reading in his classes. Throughout his teaching career, he has allowed students to spend the first 15 minutes of each class period reading books of their own choosing. His book, “Building Student Literacy Through Sustained Silent Reading,” published in 2005 by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, explains his philosophy that reading leads to learning, even if it is done for pleasure.

Through the program, nearly all his students will read from six to eight books a year while some will become so engrossed that they read 30 or more.

Gardiner also has written three books about his exotic adventures that have included climbing many of the world’s highest mountains, walking on glaciers, exploring Amazon jungles and running marathons.

Gardiner’s first teaching position was at Campbell County High School in Gillette, Wyo. Almost immediately, he began climbing nearby Devils Tower, which is at least 800 feet straight up. During the next five years he climbed it more than 100 times and then wrote the climbers’ guidebook for the National Park Service that manages Devils Tower.

Some of his other climbing experiences include 10 peaks in the Alps of Switzerland and Italy in 1983, reaching 25,500 feet on Mount Everest in 1988 and climbing Kilimanjaro, the highest peak in Africa, in 2002 and Aconcagua, the highest peak in South America (22,840 feet), in 2005.

During two trips to Greenland in the 1990s, he and his teammates located the world’s northernmost land, became the first humans to cross four glaciers and climbed 13 peaks that apparently had never been climbed before.

His book, “Under the Midnight Sun,” told of the Greenland expedition.

He also has climbed many of the major peaks in the continental United States and spent a month climbing on the Harding Icefield in Alaska in 1987.

While at Chadron State, he was the editor of The Eagle, the college newspaper, and received the award as the outstanding senior in journalism at Ivy Day 1977. During the fall of 1974 he spent four months studying British literature at the University of London.

In 1990 while teaching at Jackson Hole High School in Wyoming, Gardiner was one of 78 teachers from across the country selected for inclusion in a book “I Am A Teacher,” published by Simon and Schuster. His story was one of six spotlighted in Teacher Magazine’s final issue that year. He was featured a second time in “I Am a Teacher” on how he used his Mount Everest experience to motivate his students.

In 2005, he received a Special Recognition Adviser Award from the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund and a Medal of Merit from the Journalism Education Association.

In addition, he has coached the Billings Senior High girls’ cross-country team to Montana’s Class AA state championship in 2005 and ’06 and a second-place finish this fall.

Gardiner’s wife, Peggy, teaches at the Orchard Elementary School in Billings. The couple has three daughters.