Marshall Bratton is retiring after a 42-year career in education and 35 years at Greenwood Community High School.
After his first seven years in the teaching profession, he found a home at Greenwood Community High School and never left.
Marshall Bratton retired from his post as a U.S. government, economics and U.S. history teacher this spring after a 42-year career, 35 years of which he spent at GCHS. He spent the first year of his career in Illinois before moving to Indiana, teaching in Paoli for three years and Tell City for three years, Bratton said.
“My grandfather was a teacher for many years and I saw how fulfilling the job was for him and the impact he had on so many people,” he said. “I was always a history and social studies junkie and I was very much interested in coaching basketball, so all of those things pulled me into education.”
Bratton was a physical science teacher for the first six years of his time at Greenwood High School, before transitioning to history, economics and government. Despite the repetition of teaching for so many years, he found importance in the material and the need for students to understand it, which kept his job from being mundane, he said.
“I enjoyed the day-to-day activity of teaching and that was something that I don’t think ever changed for me. I enjoyed the classroom just as much at the end of my career as I did at the beginning,” Bratton said. “I think for me, it was just always about being able to engage kids in meaningful conversations about things I felt were important: government and economics and history. It’s not always the things that were the most exciting for kids, but they were things I felt were essential and critical.”
Bratton found different ways to engage his students. In economics, for example, he had students play the Stock Market Game, an online simulation of global capital markets and its impact on investments, he said.
“You want to educate them a little bit as citizens, make sure from a government standpoint they understand how every aspect of government worked. In economics, my approach was always I wanted them to have a sense of the importance of investing, understanding money and understanding things that influence the economy,” Bratton said.
While technology proliferated in the classroom as the decades progressed, most of the other aspects of education remained the same from the time Bratton started teaching until he retired, he said.
“I would say people are wrong when they talk about how much kids have changed. I think your perspective changes as you age, but I never found kids to be a whole lot different from the beginning of my career to the end,” Bratton said. “I taught pretty much every grade from 6th through 12th grade in my career, but juniors and seniors were my preference, they got my humor.”
A career in education is just as much a learning experience for students as it is for teachers, Bratton said.
“I had some great mentors at every stop along the way from my very first year teaching, with administrators and other people I worked with in my career,” he said. “I was always looking to try and be a little bit better and it’s one of the things about education, you still feel like you’re still learning the ropes, even when you’re an experienced veteran.”
Bratton said he’ll miss his interactions with other teachers and his students the most, but is looking forward to having a more flexible schedule in retirement.
“I think the biggest reward is seeing all my former students become adults. By the end of my career, I had kids in the classroom who were the children of kids that I had taught,” he said. “It’s always fun to see what they’re doing and how they’ve evolved as adults and I think the impact you see you had on people, that’s certainly the most rewarding part of the profession.”
