Emily Dean/ Winonan

Retired Winona State University theatre professor Vivian Fusillo was recently honored with a 2015 Kennedy Center/ Stephen Sondheim Inspirational Teacher Award for a life that she claims has been the product of chance.

“Everything in my life has been a fluke. I’ve never had a goal,” Fusillo said. “Somebody pushes me to do something, and I just make it work.”

The national award recognizes inspirational teachers by spotlighting their extraordinary impact on the lives of their students.

Fusillo said the news of her nomination came as a surprise.

“It was absolutely amazing. Totally. I didn’t really believe it,” Fusillo said.

Fusillo’s nominator, Barbara Hustedt Crook, was a student Fusillo taught in her early years of teaching.

Crook was in the fourth grade when she came to Fusillo’s classroom at a school in Lakeland, Fla.

Fusillo remembers the fourth grade classroom as small and cramped with 40 kids in her room and no air conditioning.

With having no prior experience in teaching, Fusillo remembers being nervous to teach.

“I had no idea what a fourth-grader looked like. I had no experience what-so-ever with working with children,” Fusillo said. “I hadn’t had any education classes at this point. I was really nervous. I’m always nervous. I can’t even eat before I teach I’m so nervous.”

The key to getting the kids to learn was to get them up and moving Fusillo said.

“I knew I had to get them talking, and so I had to get them up and going,” Fusillo said. “I figured the other teachers would have to teach them what they needed to know.”

One unique way Fusillo was able to connect with her classroom was by setting a cereal box on a tripod and pretending like it was a TV. Her students were told to tell the TV what they did over the weekend in order to get them to start talking and open up to her.

“I got them moving and talking after that. We did story telling, and we did English composition,” Fusillo said. “For every word, they put it into an action. We even climbed on each others’ shoulders for math.”

The most important thing, Fusillo said, was for her students to feel like they were important and that they had good ideas that were valuable.

“That was all I could do for them. I figured the other teachers were going to follow a syllabus and do all the right things,” Fusillo said.

Fusillo said her nominator, Crook, had come to her classroom early in the year after she had moved from New York.

“So here was this girl from New York City and beautifully dressed like an angel. I thought I was saved. She had ideas, and I had ideas. We both jumped on them together,” Fusillo said.

Fusillo said their classroom was full of excitement and creative ideas.

The classroom created a newspaper that won some awards that year, and they started a science museum in the back of the classroom that featured Crook’s pet snake.

“I let them lead, and I just followed. Barbara was a big help, but she didn’t see it that way,” Fusillo said. “She was in heaven that she got to do all of her ideas. I’d send her home with spelling words to write a sentence, and she’d come back with a whole story. Everyone wrote stories after that.”

Crook went on to publish magazines and write a musical, all of which she gives Fusillo credit.

In her nomination paper, Crook said that prior to being in Fusillo’s fourth grade class, she had not felt like she was being engaged in what she was learning or confident in ways she could make a difference in the classroom.

“By taking her cue from us, with her trademark joy and pizazz, she gave us the confidence to go with our own interests and strengths, wherever they might take us,” Crook wrote in her nomination essay.

Fusillo strongly believes Crook would have gone on to do the things she has done in her life without her help but has fond memories of the fourth grade class that started her 65-year teaching career.

Fusillo said she would not have left her fourth-graders if she had not gotten a job as a professor.

“I never felt like I had to leave. I have never felt that way about anything. It just didn’t dawn on me that I could do anything else,” Fusillo said. It’s always been that somebody pushes me into something.”

Fusillo said her fourth grade class and Crook has left a lasting effect on her life as a teacher.

“I just learned to go with the people in front of me. I think I direct that way. I direct to the point where they think it was all their idea. And that’s how you get things done,” Fusillo said.

Fusillo said she misses the creativity of teaching and bouncing ideas off her students, and since retiring from Winona State she is still looking for that next big push in her life.