John Neill’s Magical History Tour Gives Grossmont Students Taste of Reality

History teacher John Neill brings real-world experience to his Grossmont High School classroom, telling students their future bosses will be demanding.

When students don’t turn in their homework or complete a project on time, he’ll hand them a pink slip. They’ve been fired. And their parents have to sign it.

“In the real world, the boss doesn’t care,” says Neill, who lives in El Cajon near Grossmont High. “He expects you to do your job. So I take that into my classroom.”

He posts “Mr. Neill’s Rules” for both life and class. He spells out his expectations and boundaries, then allows students to make their own choices and learn the consequences.

It’s rewarding, he says, when he gets proof his approach has worked.

“At Homecoming, this rather large fellow, this corporal, a Marine with two tour ribbons out of Iraq, tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Hey, Mr. Neill.’ I turned around and looked at him and he said, ‘You don’t recognize me, do you?’ And I said no, and he told me his name and I was like ‘Oh, my goodness.’

“He said: ‘Remember the day in class I was being a jerk and I hadn’t turned papers in for a couple of weeks and you told me either get my act together or expect to spend the rest of my life making excuses and blaming other people?’ I said ‘Oh yeah, I remember that.’

“He said, ‘That really ticked me off. And I was going to show you.’ And he said, ‘Thank you. I joined the Marines. Best decision I made in my entire life.’ He said thank you for not just saying ‘That’s OK.’

“That was greatly gratifying.”

Big Multi-Tooler on Campus

John Neill talks the way Greg Maddux used to pitch: Get the ball, throw the ball. Deal with one batter, then the next. Keep moving. Don’t waste time. Get it done.

In the span of 90 minutes, Neill can touch on Teddy Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Mao, the U.S. Constitution, technology, Hitler on D-Day, the Irish potato famine, Vietnam, the North Carolina women’s soccer program, his Scottish ancestry and what it’s like to leap from the business world to teaching high school.

The last is exactly what Neill did seven years ago.

After 24 years in real estate, working for others and also running his own company, he went back to school and earned his teaching credential.

Since then, he’s been teaching U.S. and world history and AP art history at Grossmont, while also coaching girls soccer, lacrosse and golf.

It’s a far different world from the one he was in before, but one he jumped into with both feet.

On his website—the one where he posts his rules, schedules, syllabi and links to current events—he even has a title for it: “Mr. Neill’s Magical History Tour.”

As he talks about what he does, his passion for teaching, coaching and art is as clear as the August sky outside his living-room window.

He says in his classroom he likes to “talk and wander,” and it’s easy to imagine him giving a lecture while moving quickly around his room, clicking the next PowerPoint slide and asking questions to make his students think.

That, he says, is his goal. Across the front of his classroom, he posts a sign: “Don’t tell me what. Tell me why and tell me how.”

Neill, 53, calls himself  “an old guy who’s a new teacher,” and says he has high expectations for his students.

“Ultimately in my mind, it’s not what I teach the kids, but how I teach them to think,” he says. “And if I can get them to think, it’s irrelevant what they learn, because they can learn anything once they learn how to think.”

A Late Move to Teaching

Neill’s road to teaching was roundabout but rewarding.

He says he wouldn’t trade his business background for anything because it’s helped make him the teacher and person he is today. But as a teacher he can make a difference he could never make in real estate.

“You’re impacting people,” he says. “You’re changing lives.”

Deborah Holthaus, one of Neill’s students and a member of the golf team, calls him “the best teacher I have ever had.”

“His classes are never dull, whatsoever, and always make you want to come back the next day and learn more,” says Holthaus, who uses the terms inspiring, motivational and energized to describe him.

Many Interests, and Artistic Talents, Too

Neill’s busy life has several aspects.

There is his family. He and Margie—also a teacher—have been married 31 years and have two grown daughters.

There is his teaching. He’s loved history since he was a boy listening to his grandfather tell stories and speak about their Scottish ancestry.

There is his art. He’s a sculptor who has long sold pieces to individuals and had his work displayed in galleries.

And there is his coaching. Since coming to Grossmont in the 2003-04 school year, he’s coached girls soccer and lacrosse. Last year, he added girls golf. He’ll continue to coach soccer and golf this year, with lacrosse a maybe.

He does it simply because he enjoys it.

“The one thing you never do is calculate the hours you put in versus the dollars you make,” he says, laughing. “Forget that. You’ll just get upset if you do that. You do it because you love the kids.”

His soccer and lacrosse teams have both won league titles, and both of his daughters have played on his teams.

His daughters, in fact, got him into coaching.

When they were young, they both fell in love with soccer and Neill—who’d played pickup soccer as a kid in Lemon Grove—started helping as an assistant on their youth teams. Eventually, he became a head coach, then a club coach and then the JV coach at Grossmont before taking over the varsity.

He’d done some football coaching previously—at his alma mater, Helix, where he assisted legendary coach Jim Arnaiz for two years—but had to take a crash course in soccer along the way.

“I learned,” he says. “I got all the books I could get and watched all the soccer I could watch and headed to all the seminars.”

He’s Never Bored

Neill’s art “studio” is actually just a corner of his garage. It’s a table with all his tools, sketches and materials. And it’s where he loves to be.

“(Art) is definitely cathartic for me, definitely my relaxation,” he says.

It all started when he was young, building models. Because he’s a self-described “detail freak,” he’d spend hours getting everything exactly the way he wanted. And because the models always included figures that didn’t meet his standards, he started making his own.

Those small figures grew into larger figures, and now he works in clay and epoxy toward finished bronzes.

Years ago, he started selling what he calls “goofy Christmas stuff”–elves and gnomes—at La Mesa’s Oktoberfest. Then he started selling more serious pieces to friends. Galleries approached him.

He never had any formal training, but learned through trial and error.

Also, he’s returned to modeling. He loves doing the intricate detail work, and has also found that a) people will buy them on eBay and b) he can take them to school and use them as displays and props to keep the classroom interesting, since much of what he does relates to history.

The artwork and modeling are just outlets for his always-busy mind. He’s always changing the displays in his classroom, constantly sketching new ideas for sculptures or searching out a new book.

 “I don’t have time to be bored,” he says. “One of my kids once said, ‘Have you ever run out of ideas?’ No, my problem is, I run out of time. … I don’t have time to build all the things I want to build.”

One thing he’s come to enjoy as a teacher is seeing the quality of kids today. The only difference in students today from past generations, he says, are “their toys and access to information.”

He relates one story to make his point.

One day, Neill asked a Vietnam vet to speak to his class.

The veteran spoke about being caught up in the Tet offensive just a day after arriving in the war zone in 1968. He told of his tour and returning to America, where he was greeted not by a parade—as his enlistment sergeant once promised him—but by disdain.

 “Through the course of the 55 minutes he talked to the kids, he must have said two dozen times, ‘I never got my parade,’ ” Neill says.

Then Neill recalls: One student raised his hand at the end of class and said, “I can’t give you a parade, but could I come up and shake the hand of an American hero?”

He did, and every student in class went up, too.

The veteran called Neill a week later and told him the experience made a difference in his life.

“Even now, it chokes me up,” says Neill. “When I see that in my young people, it makes me proud.”