SWOSU English Instructor Holley Brewer wanted to be a teacher when she was four.
She’d set up her dolls and stuffed animals in her bedroom and teach them. “I had a small chalkboard my parents had given me, and I would use that for my lessons,” Brewer said.
Her family moved from Elk City to Chillicothe, Texas, when she was small, and she started kindergarten there when she was four and attended for two years. The school system didn’t have kindergarten yet, but local teacher Linda Hoke offered to teach kids too young for first grade in a converted garage at her house.
“Mrs. Hoke was kind and loving, and she made learning fun,” Brewer said. “Plus, there were snacks!”
Linda Hoke first inspired Brewer to teach. Another elementary educator first inspired her to teach English.
Brewer’s family moved back to Elk City in early 1976, and Lola Warren was her third-grade teacher at Fairview Elementary School. “I remember writing in Mrs. Warren’s class, and that really sparked an interest in English because she liked what I wrote,” Brewer said.
Brewer’s interest in English intensified in junior high and high school. “Those were always my favorite classes from seventh through 12th grade,” she said.
She learned a lot about grammar and writing in Lynn Kennemer’s senior English class at Elk City High School. Kennemer demanded a lot from her students, which Brewer appreciated when she took English Composition during her first semester of college.
Brewer graduated from Elk City High School in 1986 as class valedictorian and headed to the University of Oklahoma where she trained to teach English.
Her first teaching job after graduating from OU was at Newkirk, near Ponca City. She taught high school English and Newspaper from 1991 to 1994. Then she taught a mix of English, Drama, and Creative Writing to junior high and high school students at Purcell until 2003.
She moved to northeast Oklahoma and taught junior high and high school English, Drama, Speech, Literature, and Humanities at Nowata and Claremore from 2003 to 2008.
Brewer had been recognized as high school teacher of the year in Newkirk and Purcell, and she still loved teaching, but after more than 17 years in public schools, she was ready for a change.
She had earned a master’s degree from Northeastern State University in Tahlequah in 2007, and she took a job as an academic advisor at OU in Norman the next year. In addition to guiding students in more than 70 majors through enrollment decisions so they would stay on track to graduate, she also taught the first-year student orientation class and a class for students on academic probation.
One of her advisees was OU’s Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback Baker Mayfield. According to Brewer, he was polite and very pleasant to work with as a new transfer student.
“He listened to my course recommendations carefully and answered questions with ‘Yes ma’am,’” Brewer said. “We talked about him walking on the football team—he was very humble and excited to be on campus.”
Though Brewer enjoyed her new career and was even named outstanding academic advisor for the state of Oklahoma in 2012, she missed teaching English, and she wanted to move closer to her family in Elk City.
Brewer had taught online English Composition classes for the SWOSU-Sayre campus part time for a few years while working in Norman, which whetted her appetite to return to the classroom full time. So, when SWOSU needed a fulltime English Instructor at Weatherford in 2017, she applied and was offered the job.
She’s been there since. And she’s very happy.
“I love teaching at SWOSU,” Brewer said.
Most of her students are from western Oklahoma, and she enjoys teaching the kind of friendly people she grew up with. “I remember walking across the campus to get my faculty ID on my first day in 2017, and I was amazed at how many students said hi to me,” she said.
That didn’t happen at OU.
“It reinforced my belief that I had made the right decision to leave OU and come to SWOSU,” Brewer said.
Brewer even reunited with Lori Gwyn, one of her former Newkirk High School English students. Dr. Gwyn is Director of Sponsored Programs at SWOSU.
This semester, Brewer gets to return to the alma mater that she left as valedictorian and teach an English Composition II class for SWOSU to Elk City High School students.
At SWOSU, Brewer gets to teach English in a pleasant, laid-back atmosphere with encouraging, student- centered colleagues.
“I have a wonderful department chair who supports me, and the SWOSU environment is like a family,” Brewer said. “This is my dream job.”
The job that she’s wanted since she was four.
