Abby Silverman

Ms. Dominguez teaching Honors Classic Sophomore Class.

BSM’s longest-reigning English teacher’s journey started at a small bookstore near Ridgedale when the BSM principal offered her a job for the coming school year. Anne Marie Dominguez began teaching before any of her students were born. In her early days, she was a volunteer teacher in Belize, and after discovering her passion for working with children and helping them learn to read and write, she obtained her teaching degree at St. Thomas.

Through her 30 years at Benilde-St. Margaret’s, Dominguez has taught various classes, her newest being the Honors Classic Sophomore Class. In this class, they dive into the parallels between the unique science fiction novels 1984 and A Brave New World. “In the past five years, I have taken up science fiction, and what I think is interesting is how authors in science fiction were so prescient, meaning that they were able to connect with issues that had no resemblance of what they are now, cell phones, technology, all these things, but they were aware of it…and the impact on humanity, which I found just fascinating,” Dominguez said.

Furthermore, stimulating deeper thought in her teaching, Dominguez instructs her students to look at a page as a painting and inspect it, drawing hidden connections and truths between the fictional and real world. “[Reading] will just impact your understanding of people and develop compassion and sensitivity, which is what we need so much of today,” Dominguez said.

When not teaching the classics of the literary canon, the literature of her choice has to be A Gentleman in Moscow. Though not exactly a historical novel, it provides plenty of information on the Russian Revolution.”It’s so delightfully written, and the character is complex, a little bit of mystery, a little bit of suspense,” Dominguez said.

A three-way tie takes first place for her favorite literature to teach, including Fredrick Douglass, Jane Eyre, and especially The Great Gatsby. “I think it’s Fitzgerald’s finest work in terms of his turn of phrase and his sentence structure and kind of exposing without people understanding the conflict even within himself, of wanting to be very wealthy, but also being disgusted by that life,” Dominguez said.

Students fortunate enough to have Ms. Dominguez as a teacher are forever grateful for their remarkable improvement in their writing skills. “She likes to form connections with her students and grades her essays with a lot of description on why she grades them and why you got this grade, and I think it’s really helpful,” Hannah Buller said.

The students at BSM are blessed with the gift of Ms. Dominguez and her ability to impart her knowledge and make meaningful connections with her students. “She’s just always been by my side, and we’ve created a good bond together, and she’s taught me a lot; she’s always been a teacher that I admire, and she inspires me to do great things,” Buller said.