His Story
John Sullivan loved to draw as a small child and was sure he would be “an artist.” One grandparent thought he would paint billboards and the other that he would “go to Paris and starve in a garret.” His mother suggested teaching, and he struck a deal with her: he would pay for his own art college, and she would pay for graduate school. He earned a BFA in illustration at Massachusetts College of Art in 1974, where he also became the college’s first animator. He turned down a well-paid art director job to finish his master’s degree there, and took the job the day after graduating. “I felt I had done everything I said I would do.”
At the T-shirt company he took on a high school intern named Scott Nash, who kept telling him he would make a great teacher. One fall, Nash told him his high school was looking for an art teacher and brought him in to meet the department head. “I did and fell in love with the profession. I was hired for a six-month term and it has lasted for 25 wonderful years.” He has taught at Barnstable High School since 1978, and he left briefly in 1990–91 to study animation at the California Institute of the Arts and then to work as a clean-up artist on Turner Pictures’ The Pagemaster. He also studied film at the British Film Institute.
His students have gone on to Disney, Warner Bros., DreamWorks, Sony, Imax and Electronic Arts, and to the stage and screen. The first freshman he ever cast, Neal McDonough, was the Cowardly Lion in 1983 and later appeared in Band of Brothers and Minority Report. He has also written and illustrated children’s books, drawn two coloring books, written six musicals for the stage and co-written two chapters of the school text The Stage and the School. Barnstable Public Schools honored him in 1999 for his work on the high school’s performing arts center and its production of The Wizard of Oz.
Beyond the Classroom
Sullivan helped design the high school’s 1,440-seat performing arts center, the largest high school auditorium in New England, and an animation studio for the art department. Since 1979 his Drama Club has run a Haunted House, and its student-built E.T. model drew a standing ovation from the town council and some 7,000 people to the Halloween parade. For the town’s First Night celebration the club built a 100-foot-long, 16-foot-high dragon on wheels with its own generator, and it co-produced a Disney parade and a Warner Bros. event with the town. For four summers, students also built enormous audio-animatronic dinosaur exhibits at the Cape Cod Mall, one of which was voted “Best in the Nation” by the Dinomation Company.
In 1985 he started the Barnstable Summer Family Theater so parents could perform with their children. He has staged over 60 musicals, and a typical Wizard of Oz puts over 325 people on stage with a 26-piece orchestra, a real dog, chickens and a live green horse. He also takes students to professional theater about four times a year.
Philosophy Into Practice
Sullivan believes “everyone is capable of improvement” and compares talent to riding a bicycle: “The more you practice the better you will get.” When he cast a hockey player who couldn’t dance as Conrad Birdie, he quietly arranged private lessons with a former drama club member, kept stopping the big number just before the dance, and on the Monday before opening the cast watched Eric leap, moonwalk, do one-armed handstands and slide across the stage on his knees. A student who had complained about the casting later told him, “You were right to cast Eric.” He keeps his classroom as a working animation studio, with life-size Monsters, Inc. and Yoda statues, 30 animation discs and 12 computers. Students must work in every aspect of theater, because, he says, “I don’t want just a bunch of ‘actors.'”
“We’re in the business of making memories.”— a favorite saying, as quoted by a colleague and in his essay
“I’ve always thought of myself as a cheerleader, who gets students worked up over an assignment or project, gives them the information on how to do it and then steps back to see what happens.”— from his essay, “In the Classroom”
In His Own Words
“It’s how people behave when the spotlight is off them.”— a school committee member, quoted in his essay “How Do You Measure Success?”
“They are contributors, not takers, the first ones to volunteer for something.”— from his essay, “How Do You Measure Success?”
“I try not to look at them as “my accomplishments” because they did it with their talent. I was simply the one, like my mother, who saw talent in them they didn’t know they had.”— from his essay, “Professional Profile”
“The more you practice the better you will get.”— from his essay, “In the Classroom”
“Nobody going into teaching does it for the money, but nobody goes into teaching expecting to be burned out after five years.”— from his essay, “Educational Issues”
What Others Said
“If there was ever a teacher who is truly able to stimulate the curiosity and imaginations of the students in his care, it is John.”— Patricia Graves, Principal, Barnstable High School
“John Sullivan’s classroom is a visual, auditory and academic treat.”— André Ravenelle, Superintendent, Barnstable Public Schools
“If you live long enough, you might be lucky to meet one person who actually can be described by the term “larger than life.””— Edward O’Toole, colleague
“He gives adults in the community the chance to act with our students in most productions.”— Carl Lopes, Art Department Chair, Barnstable High School
“He works miracles with students by turning them from “at-risk” to “at-promise” individuals.”— Bobbi Moritz, colleague and parent
“John is exactly the kind of teacher that every student should have, and that every teacher should aspire to be.”— Andrew Rapo, former student, Senior Game Developer at Warner Bros. Online
“John Sullivan is on the front line, in the trenches, securing our future every day, the old fashioned way.”— James P. McDonough, community member
“An exceptional teacher brings his or her passion for the subject into the classroom. John Sullivan is such a teacher.”— C. L. Fornari, parent of former students