To The One Who Wears Many Hats
STORY By greta stuckey
Surrounded by red lockers, Dr. Michael G. Panzer walks through the hallways of Roy C. Ketcham Senior High School to reach his classroom. The sound of the first bell at 7:30 a.m. is only the beginning of a long day ahead as students begin to pile into the building.
After eight periods of teaching at the high school, Dr. Panzer heads north on Route 9 toward the Marist College campus. Only being at Marist for a few classes a week, Dr. Panzer puts on his Irish flat cap, locates his classroom and gets teaching.
Serving as an adjunct professor for the Marist history department, his days are busy. His schedule is often filled with teaching, research, writing and spending quality time with his family.
“When I’m in the classroom, I stay present in the moment,” Dr. Panzer said. “I’m a college professor here, a high school teacher at Ketcham and at home, I’m dad. I have to navigate all my responsibilities in life so that I can do my best in every situation.”
Starting at Ketcham in 1999, his high school classroom has become a second home. With world maps, flags of Africa and a Rush poster on his classroom walls, Dr. Panzer hopes to create a comfortable space for students to learn and grow. When students begin a class with Dr. Panzer, they often have little to no background on the subject he’s teaching.
One former student at Marist who graduated in 2021, Reese Gellman, took her first undergraduate history class with Dr. Panzer during her senior year. After taking his History of Modern Africa course, she was blown away and signed up for his History of Modern Latin America class in the spring semester.
“He really keeps students engaged because he’s a great storyteller,” Gellman said. “The critical analysis that I got from him combined with his sense of humor made me look forward to class. I came out of those courses with an expanded worldview that I wouldn’t have been able to reach on my own.”
Teaching at Ketcham for 23 years and at Marist for nine years, Dr. Panzer has taught a variety of courses including African Studies, Latin American Studies, Philosophy: A History of Thought, Holocaust Studies, Global History and Geography.
“I was convinced that I was going to teach American history when I left high school,” Dr. Panzer said. “As it turns out, I’m way more of a world history person.”
It wasn’t until Dr. Panzer attended Iona College for a master's degree in history that he took a class in African studies. When he browsed the course catalog for the fall semester, the only history class that worked in his schedule was Modern Africa, so he signed up.
“When I got to that class, I realized how much I didn’t know about the world, how much I didn’t know about myself and how much I didn’t know about a continent,” Dr. Panzer said. “That really bothered me.”
After that moment, Dr. Panzer made it his mission to take every course related to African studies during his remaining time at Iona. Those courses later influenced him to get a Ph.D. in History from the University at Albany with his dissertation focused on African studies.
Later traveling to South Africa, Mozambique and Zambia, Dr. Panzer got to experience the countries’ cultures and history first-hand. The fieldwork he conducted there reaffirmed his passion for African studies. Looking ahead, he hopes to revisit those countries and also make trips to Tanzania and Malawi for further research.
“I'm proud to take what I have been fortunate to learn and pay it forward to other people to help humanize places in the world that are otherwise neglected and not thought of as equal,” Dr. Panzer said.
Before working at Ketcham and Marist, he worked for the Warwick Valley Central School District and also taught college courses at Mount Saint Mary College and the University at Albany.
Panzer’s first years of teaching were stressful because he lacked financial stability and moved back home with his parents. His first teaching job in the Warwick Valley School District provided one of the hardest challenges of his career: a self-identifying Neo-Nazi in his class.
“He was over 18 and had failed school a couple of times,” Dr. Panzer said tensely. “He had swastikas tattooed on his neck and on his arms and I was teaching him U.S. history which was a tough situation. Overall, it was a great school, but right away, it was an eye-opening reality check that not all students are what you see on TV.”
From there, Dr. Panzer realized that he would have to adapt his teaching style for any audience. While not all students wanted to learn about African studies, Dr. Panzer made it his mission to pique their interest in at least one aspect of each lesson.
Illustration by Tyler Wahl
After that difficult year, Dr. Panzer relocated and recognized the importance of his role as an educator. Having to adapt yet again, Dr. Panzer reshaped the idea of a traditional classroom during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. While the pandemic provided unforeseen challenges for all educators, it hit Dr. Panzer particularly hard because he has Lupus.
According to the Lupus Foundation of America, Lupus is a chronic autoimmune disease that can cause inflammation and pain in any part of the body. Typically, it attacks healthy tissues in people's skin, joints and internal organs such as the kidneys and heart.
While the medications Dr. Panzer takes help to keep his Lupus in check, he had a setback this year. With a variety of joint issues and fibromyalgia, he had wrist surgery and then underwent double elbow surgery this winter.
“Anytime I would get a Lupus flare, the inflammation in my joints was such that I was losing feeling in my hands and my arms,” Dr. Panzer said. “I was having trouble typing, using a computer mouse and it was making it difficult to drive.”
In addition to the pain Lupus causes, it also means that Dr. Panzer is immunocompromised. During the height of the pandemic last year, he taught all his classes at Ketcham and Marist remotely to protect his health.
With the goal to educate students no differently than before, he worked hard to restructure his classroom. Working from home for all of 2021, he set up his computer with a double screen so that he could focus on the students and make it feel like an in-person experience.
“People were always asking questions in his class so I was really engaged even though it was completely remote,” said Gellman. “I never had him in person, but I looked forward to it just as much as any in-person classes. There were projects that we did in his class that brought out a passion in me that I had never experienced in my academic career.”
Despite the challenges that come with teaching, Dr. Panzer has found comfort in the connections he makes with students. “I’m trying to help all students appreciate Africa's history and be as passionate about it as I am because then we can start correcting the unfortunate legacies of colonialism in academia and such.”
Without knowing it at the time, Dr. Panzer influenced a number of his former students to pursue advanced degrees in history with concentrations in African and Latin American studies. One of his former students is now a professor at Ball State University and teaches Latin American History. Another former student who attended Ketcham is now finishing his Ph.D. in African Studies at Indiana University.
Currently, Dr. Panzer continues to grow as an educator and academic. In the coming months, he hopes to finish his book, which looks at the liberation struggle in the country of Mozambique. In the book, he specifically addresses the history of refugees, state formation and education.
On that crisp fall day at Iona College, Dr. Panzer realized that his worldview was limited, so he did everything in his power to learn. Today, he hopes to bring the same curious passion and educational desire to his own students. Despite the long days and unexpected events when teaching, Dr. Panzer walks into each class, at every location, with a smile and an energy that ignites a newfound passion within students.
Photography by Alejandro Basalo & Archie Coueslant