05/22/2026
It’s Dr. Cooke’s time to shine!!
Dr. Cooke brings thirty-four years of teaching to the classroom — twenty of those at the university level, where he taught philosophy at distinguished institutions including the University of Dayton, Marquette University, and Belmont Abbey College. For the past fourteen years, he has channeled that same intellectual rigor and passion into teaching art here at South Charlotte Middle School. The result is an educator who doesn’t just teach children how to hold a brush; he teaches them how to think, how to create, and how to care deeply about what they make.
Dr. Cooke has built a Visual Arts program grounded in three pillars: drawing, painting, and sculpting in clay. Every grade level moves through a unit in each discipline, giving students a well-rounded foundation. For students in Honors Art, the curriculum extends into plein air landscape painting — painting outdoors, in the natural world — and more advanced sculpture. It is a program that respects students’ capacity for growth and challenges them to meet it.
In an era where schools have increasingly moved away from hands-on, make-something-with-your-hands learning, Dr. Cooke proudly wears an apron. He will tell you it is a symbol — one of getting your hands dirty, of creating something real. He is one of the last teachers in our schools who still embodies that tradition, and our children are richer for it. He reminds his students that what they are doing when they create feels good because it is good — and research backs him up. Engagement in the arts has been shown to add more than a year to life expectancy and to reduce stress-related health risks as effectively as regular exercise. Dr. Cooke knows this, and he passes that understanding on to every student who walks through his door.
Dr. Cooke often reflects on what he loves most about his work: being surrounded by original creations in a world dominated by mass production. Every piece a student makes is genuinely one of a kind. He sees that, and he honors it. Walking into his classroom, you can feel it — the sense that real things are being made here, that these young people are producing work that matters.
The results of Dr. Cooke’s teaching speak for themselves. In his very first year at SCMS, his students took home three top prizes and the coveted Best in Show award at an area exhibit. He describes getting a lump in his throat that day — the first time he felt genuine pride in students beyond his own children. That pride, he says, returns every single year.
But perhaps his proudest professional moment came when two of his Honors Art students won silver medals at the national Scholastic Art and Writing Awards — one of the most prestigious competitions in the country for young artists. The award ceremony was held at Carnegie Hall. These students painted using an advanced palette-knife-only technique that Dr. Cooke taught himself entirely from books — specifically, texts on Charles Hawthorne’s Cape Cod School of Art and colorist painting methods — before passing that knowledge on to his students. His takeaway? Reading is the single most important thing we teach children in school. It taught him to paint, and through him, it taught a new generation.
Students describe Dr. Cooke as intense, serious, and wholly devoted to creating a space where they can lose themselves in creative flow — with a well-timed middle-school sense of humor thrown in. His guiding advice to every student is simple and profound: “Trust the process and engage in it. Getting lost in the creating is the most important part of visual art, not the final product.” That message — to value the journey, not just the outcome — is one that extends far beyond the art room.
What moves me most about Dr. Cooke is something he said about his legacy. When he retires, he told us, what will matter most to him is whether he was a good husband and father. His children, he said, are his most important students. That kind of perspective — the humility to keep what matters most at the center — is exactly the kind of person I want shaping my child’s understanding of what it means to make something and care about it.
And since every great teacher deserves a charming detail: Dr. Cooke has a tortoise named Dooley, given to him by his future wife back in 1996. She is now nearly thirty years old, going strong, and named after a Marquette librarian Dr. Cooke never actually met — a Jesuit priest named Fr. Dooley who curated philosophy books. He discovered years later that Dooley is female. The breed can live up to 120 years. Somehow, that feels just right for a teacher whose influence will echo for generations.
We are grateful every day that Dr. Cooke chose South Charlotte Middle School. Our children are better artists, better thinkers, and better people for having sat in his classroom.
