Gerard W. Teachman

Dr. Gerard (Gerry) Teachman was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1938 and attended public schools in Detroit and Royal Oak. After three years in the Army, where he attended the Army Language School and spent two years in Germany, he attended Wayne State University and majored in German and foreign language education. He started teaching at Bloomfield Hills Andover High School in 1962 and transferred to Cooley High School in Detroit in 1963. In 1966, he took a year’s leave of absence from the Detroit Public School system, to study philosophy at the University of Basel in Switzerland. He also studied the Waldorf training center in Dornach, Switzerland, outside of Basel. In 1967, he returned to public school teaching at Northern High School in Detroit and continued his studies at Wayne State University, where he ultimately received his Doctor of Philosophy in the History and Philosophy of Education. In 1976, he was asked to accept a position as special consultant to the U.S. District Court Monitoring Commission, which was overseeing the implementation of the Detroit Desegregation case. Upon completion of that case, he became the Social Studies Department Chairman at Seaholm High School in Birmingham, Michigan.

Dr. Teachman retired in 1994 from public school education but continues to be an Adjunct Professor at Wayne State University, where he has periodically taught undergraduate and graduate classes in Philosophy of Education for over thirty years. He also does consulting on a part-time basis.

Gerry has been married to Mary Jean Teachman since 1990. He has two grown sons, Robert and Jonathan, from a previous marriage, and a stepdaughter, Valarie from Mary Jean. Mary Jean also had a son, Forrest, who suffered from manic depression and committed suicide in 1995.

Dr. Teachman minored in Psychology in college, taught psychology classes in high school, and maintained a professional interest in mental health and mental illness most of his teaching career. After his stepson’s death, however, he and Mary Jean sought a more active involvement in the area of mental illness research which led them to MIRA.