Life lessons
It was likely the last time she was ever dissuaded from her chosen path. Dauphinee, 57, has determinedly pursued a life of teaching and learning filled with both accomplishments and difficult challenges. Through it all, her resolute spirit and irreverent sense of humor have earned the deep love and respect of family, colleagues and students for the woman they affectionately call 'Dauph.'
Hitting the books
Her first career choice thwarted, Dauphinee instead became a teacher and coach, something her father had once aspired to. She grew up in St. Anthony Village, Minn., in an athletic family-dad Jack played football and mom Jeanne was a former professional dancer-she realized that combining sports and education suited her. "My sister [Jill] reminds me that I was always telling people how to do things ... figuring out ways to make it easy for people to learn something," Dauphinee recalled.
She earned a bachelor of science degree, with a double major in health and physical education, and a coaching certificate from Mankato State University (now Minnesota State University, Mankato), then launched a career as a health teacher with Spring Lake Park School District #16 that has spanned 34 years and counting. She's been head coach for the girls' softball and volleyball teams, as well as coaching track, basketball and golf.
The pioneer
As the district's first diversity coordinator, Dauphinee worked to bring gender, race and other forms of social inclusiveness into schools' curricula. When a teacher related a story about a child of color who picked up the peach-colored crayon labeled "flesh color" and compared it to her own darker skin, it made an impact on Dauphinee, and on the materials purchased from then on.
After Title IX, she became the first coach for the school's girls' softball and golf programs. She was an early volunteer for Minnesota SEED (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity) Project, part of a national program instructing educators on how to bring multiculturalism, disability sensitivity and gender-fairness into their institutions. Yet Dauphinee made it clear, "My teaching always came first."
'Totally not like any other class'
Dauphinee's health education class is almost a rite of passage for the students at Spring Lake Park High School. Natalie Barnard, an 18-year-old senior, took the course last year but first heard about it as a freshman. "[It's] totally not like any other class in high school," she said enthusiastically. "Everything that she teaches you is so like real-life stuff that you can take with you."
That's Dauphinee's goal-to instill in her students an awareness of influences, like media images and peer pressure, that can lead them into unhealthy behaviors and then to help them develop the necessary skills to cope with adulthood.
Along with nutrition and sex education, she discusses drug addiction, eating disorders and patriarchy-the privileging of males over females. "It's helping them know how to be in relationships with themselves and with the opposite sex," she said.
The positive response to Dauphinee's class stems from her innate ability to connect the lessons to her students' personal lives. "She brings up things that you wouldn't normally think about and then you realize what a big deal they are so it kind of opens your eyes to it," Barnard said. "I knew what [gender inequality] was like years ago but I didn't realize to what extent it was still like that today."
Dauphinee often uses history-including her own-to illustrate the subject of patriarchy. As an athlete and a coach, she's witnessed advancements in girls' sports since Title IX, the landmark 1972 legislation addressing gender inequality in athletics, but she's also had to fight the stubborn vestiges.
"When we started the [girls'] softball team, [we were given] all the boys' old baseball equipment," she recalled. "We weren't getting the funding that Title IX told us we were supposed to have."
Dauphinee won't let unfairness go unchallenged. When a misguided rule-limiting the number of innings a girl could pitch in a softball game-cost her team a berth in the 1980 State Championships, she worked to change it by becoming president of the Minnesota Softball Coaches Association. "[It's great] that I'm living through an age when girls started to have opportunities and I can really fight for them," she said. Unfortunately, Dauphinee discovered that her fighting spirit had its limits.
Burned to a crisp
By 1988, she was putting in 18-hour days teaching classes, coaching two teams, doing research, serving on committees and participating in sports. "I was working 900 miles an hour. I'd try to sleep ... and I'd wake up in the middle of the night trying to figure out what I had to do [the next day]," she remembered. "I was pretty fried-'crisp,' I called myself."
She decided that she needed to get away from the demands of teaching. After caddying for a year on the LPGA tour, she returned to school to earn a degree in chemical dependency counseling. "A lot of the things I learned through drug counseling is reflected in my class, trying to make logic of sometimes illogical situations, trying to help ourselves through life," Dauphinee said. "It re-ignited [my desire to teach] ... I could see that what I had the opportunity to be a part of mattered. Being with young people is my niche."
With every up, there's a down
A reinvigorated Dauphinee returned to teaching with newfound energy and a unique morning routine. "It may sound kind of weird but ... when I wake up, I seem to get 'downloaded!'" she said, describing how she comes up with new approaches to deal with students' current issues. "I have some creative force that spurs me on ... and it makes me excited."
Yet Dauphinee admitted, "With every up, there's a down." She's lost several students to accidents, disease and suicides. She tries to find the positive in these tragedies. The death of a beloved fellow teacher spurred her to include grief and loss in her curriculum after she saw how students struggled with his passing.
"I feel a deep responsibility to teach about what's happening to them," Dauphinee explained. "[It] brings about an awareness of the human experience." The beauty of the human experience, she said, is finding others who bring out the encouragement and best in us when things are tough.
Facing her mortality
She's often been the one to provide that encouragement. But there have been times when she's been the one in need. Along with accepting the help of others, Dauphinee has looked inward for what she needs. And, she said, "I have changed dramatically."
Cancer, she said, has been the catalyst for that change. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1996. A lumpectomy swiftly followed, then radiation treatment. "The day I found out, I started researching," she said. "I went over the doctor's opinions." She read everything she could on breast cancer. "It's the teacher in me," she said.
Faced with her own mortality, Dauphinee's emotions, "ran the gamut. I was scared, courageous, funny, mad, depressed, resentful and whiny." She described a morning when she lay in bed. "I looked at the ceiling and asked, 'How did I get here?'"
Dauphinee decided that cancer was "75 percent what we do and 25 percent genetic," and, she said, she changed "almost everything. I used to drink 6-12 cans of pop a day. Now I drink only water. I used to eat junk food; now I'm a nutrition freak."
She changed more than her physical life. True to her resilient nature, Dauphinee has found the silver lining. "I think it's probably the best thing that ever happened to me," she declared. "I had asked for a more spiritual life and I got cancer. That does make you have a spiritual life." She marveled at how the disease brought people back into her life, like the childhood classmate who administered her first radiation treatment and the former student who was the head nurse when Dauphinee woke up in the hospital after her second illness.
Dauphinee described the 'spiritual walk' on which she's embarked since her first diagnosis, reading extensively from authors like Louise Hay and Jerry Stocking about the mind-body connection to cancer, exploring alternative therapies and doing a lot of forgiveness. "I looked at all the different ways to come to a better peace of mind ... it's been a wonderful walk," she said.
Back again
Daupinee discovered four years ago that the cancer had returned "in the same spot where I was radiated," she said regretfully. She had a double mastectomy and the doctors said she was cancer free.
Dauphinee wishes she had not had radiation therapy but has come to terms with it. "You do the best you can with what you know and then you accept it. You allow yourself to be human so you do grieve [but] you're also pleased because you can live.
"I really want to live. So I have rules like 'every day I have to laugh really hard before I go to sleep.'" Laughter comes easily to Dauphinee-when asked how breast cancer had changed her, she responded, "It's made me a little lighter in the chest!"
Two days after her initial interview for this story, Dauphinee was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. She struggled with the reality of her diagnosis. After surgery, her doctor told her that the cancer had been "encapsulated ... they got it all. He said my chances of dying from cancer were less than being hit by a car."
She is being treated by a homeopath, though her treatment is supervised by a M.D.
Looking forward
Dauphinee has learned from her fight against cancer to give herself permission to enjoy life outside of the classroom. "I live by a little lake [where] I have a canoe and I look at the eagles, the loons, the deer, and the foxes," she said, adding that she when she's not outdoors, she loves to read mysteries and holistic books. Dauphinee plans to retire within five years to travel with her loving extended family-including her sister, brother-in-law, nephews and niece-and spend half the year on land they purchased in Mexico's Mayan Riviera.
But don't expect to find Dauphinee spending all her time lounging on the beach. One of her best friends, a psychologist, has bought property next door, and Dauphinee's already wondering if they might team up on some sex education seminars for Mexican educators.
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