When Theo Hummer graduated from Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science and left Mississippi for college, she thought she’d seen the last of her home state. But three decades later, she has found herself back at the high school, imparting her love of poetry and music to a new generation.
Hummer told The Dispatch Friday that she has a newfound appreciation for Columbus’ thriving arts scene, and loves the challenges and satisfaction of teaching some of Mississippi’s brightest young minds.
“I was like, ‘Later Mississippi, I will never live here again,’” she said. “But I’d always felt very deeply the debt that I owed to MSMS. I wanted to pay back some of that. … And I cannot believe how much stuff happens in Columbus. I grew up in Meridian, which is about twice the size, but it has about a quarter of the cultural stuff happening.”
Hummer chased her love of poetry to Southern California, where she got an undergraduate degree from the University of California, Berkeley before going on to get her doctorate in poetics from Cornell University. She graduated just as the Great Recession was taking hold and hopped from job to job, she said, taking teaching gigs across the country.
Then, Hummer found a program on the internet connecting teachers of English as a Second Language with places abroad in need of their services, which sent her to Hodonin in the Czech Republic to teach English to managers and engineers at a cigarette factory.
While Hummer enjoyed taking journeys by rail to Munich, Prague, Krakow, Budapest and Venice, living in the Czech Republic wasn’t for her, she said.
Hummer returned to North America and found an application for her teaching experience at the Interlochin Center for the Arts in Michigan, where she’d once attended music camp as a viola player. That was her first time teaching courses for gifted kids, and she was immediately reminded of her experience at MSMS.
“If you find a kid who loves one thing, you can use that to teach them anything,” she said. “That was when I realized that when you teach kids who have that thing they love, that spark that makes them ask questions about the world, it was just amazing.”
She was teaching in Detroit when her Canadian then-boyfriend, Kale Sharman, proposed she move to Canada and marry him. Hummer agreed, commuting back to Michigan to teach at Detroit’s College for Creative Studies.
Hummer then found a gig as a general-purpose ghostwriter, writing job application letters, business text and even a couple novels and memoirs. Then, she found a job using her ESL experience to help new immigrants qualify for citizenship tests.
She also got involved with Ontario’s decentralized publishing scene, working as a bookseller, a small printing press and eventually as a freelance editor.
But Hummer still found herself looking for more. Searching for a new job, she stumbled upon a teaching position at her old high school back in Columbus. She packed her bags, started work on getting her husband a path stateside, and in 2022 began teaching at MSMS.
By the time she returned to MSMS almost all her teachers had left, but her music teacher Dawn Barham was still there, Hummer said.
Barham remembered that Hummer had wanted to try cello in high school and sent her back home with the school’s cello and instructions to learn it so she could contribute its sound to the school’s music repertoire.
“(Hummer) played viola for me and took guitar at MSMS as a student in the early ‘90s,” Barham said in a statement Monday. “She excelled at both. Fast forward and she plays viola, violin or cello for our MSMS chamber group and steps in as an alto whenever she can with the MSMS Singers. I am delighted she has come home to MSMS to share her multitude of talents with our students.”
Since then, Hummer has taken her cello-playing beyond the school grounds, playing for the Golden Triangle Regional Theater’s 2024 production of “Oklahoma!” She just played with the Columbus Girlchoir for their Christmas performance as well.
“It was definitely a challenge, as a very new cello player,” she said. “But it was so much fun, I loved it, and that’s the kind of opportunity you never get in Los Angeles or Boston, because there are plenty of professionals there. Whereas if you’re living in a small town you get these chances to try things.”
Hummer has found a lot of reasons to appreciate Columbus. But at the end of it all, when asked about what she values most, she returned to the teachers she works with and the students she teaches.
“As much as I was never going to come back to Mississippi, MSMS is the best job I’ve ever had,” she said. “It is exhausting, it is non-stop, but my colleagues are so interesting and weird and fun and outspoken about the right way to help kids learn. … There’s this seriousness of purpose coupled with a playfulness from the joy of learning and liking smart weird kids. It’s just as magic as it was when I was a student.”
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Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 43 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
