By Noah Martinez and Giavanna Deperio
On one random day during “The Scarlet Letter” unit in Patrick Hannigan’s class, something particularly strange happened. Mr. Hannigan was known for his out-of-the-box teaching style, but when he started to berate and yell at the students as they walked in on that fateful day, absolutely no one had a clue as to what was going on.
The story of lambasting students so they could experience the environment of the book is one of many that future students and teachers alike would pass down about Mr. Hannigan.
An eccentric and unconventional English and Journalism teacher, Patrick Charles Hannigan passed on February 23rd, 2026. His life is one that is meant to be celebrated and remembered with reverence, so we at The Courier gathered together some of Hannigan’s closest friends, colleagues, and former students to take a look into the great man that Hannigan was.
As a teacher…
Pat Hannigan was known to be the ‘weird’ one.
Simran Kalkat, Logan class of 2018 and current researcher at Boston University, remembered she “[would] walk into his classroom and he’s blaring a really obscure, eccentric song. It’s the classic Mr. Hannigan tale that everyone will regurgitate back to you.”
“It was super annoying.” Strawberry Pancakes was the song that current AP Lang teacher at Logan, Tim Campbell, remembered most.
“And he put it on constant loop for like a week… It made you crazy. You could see people in his room being like Oh, more banana pancakes.’ But it was a funny thing.” Moments like these, Campbell looks back on fondly.
“That’s just the kind of guy he was.” Kalkat continued. “He was just hungry for knowledge guy… without being in anyone’s face about it… He imparted this curiosity on a lot of his students.” And that was just the thing about Mr. Hannigan; even though some of the things he did were obscure, unorthodox, and sometimes seemed like they were pointless, they all reflected on his genuine, human curiosity. He played an obscure song every day, sometimes to teach, and sometimes to simply have fun with something odd.
Former student Roman Loyola comments on the controversial way Hannigan handled the Scarlet Letter.
“It’s an old book, it’s not that interesting,” Loyola said. “But it is a remarkable book, so he would go, he would try and find different ways to make that impression on students … He understood that a lot of traditional ways didn’t work anymore.”
Pat Hannigan changed the status quo…
of what education looked like for his classroom, and in a lot of ways, made it seem like he could somehow predict the future of education. This change was due in large part to his student teacher and eventual peer, Tim Campbell.
“He started out as my master teacher, because when I began here… I started as a student teacher.” Campbell said. “At first I just thought he was really weird because he’s a little unusual, but once I got hired on and I was here permanently we just—we hit it off.”
Campbell described his relationship with Hannigan as a sort of “partners in crime” relationship. With both having a drive to go against the grain of teaching, it only made sense for their classrooms to be placed side by side in the 500s.
The tactics Hannigan employed to make “The Scarlet Letter” enjoyable were doable for Hannigan to do himself, but he had bigger ideas. With Campbell, the “Animal Farm” unit could make “The Scarlet Letter” unit look like a regular Tuesday.
“We painted over the door numbers, and my room was Campbellgaria and his room was Hanniganistan. We basically played out [the war from] Animal Farm in our rooms.” Campbell said.
Flags were taken off walls in place of Campbellgaria and Hanniganistan national symbols, students participated in morning pledges to their new nationality, and propaganda was spread about each other’s classrooms. “If anything would ever happen wrong in the classroom, we’d all blame it on those guys over in Hanniganistan. I’d make the kids… walk out of [the] room [and] just give them a mean look.” Campbell continued, “We wrote ‘four legs good’ on my door in big white letters, and then ‘two legs bad’ on the other door… If you go out there in the 500s, you can still see a shadow of the paint on the door.”
Hannigan and Campbell’s approach had incredible results. However, to get there, they were simply brave enough to…
Ask the right questions
“Are the actions you’re doing right, and how well do they fit the goals you have?” was one of the most important questions the two teachers asked, “…because sometimes we’ll do things that are contrary to our goals.”
One of the simplest changes they made was showing movies before books.
“We realized we show movies after the book. Why do we do that? That’s stupid,” Campbell said. “We give, we assign 20 pages of a book for reading of a book that’s too hard for the kids to read, and we know they don’t understand it fully … We have to give a quiz on the surface level, like ‘what was the dog’s name?’ or something, just to prove that you read it.”
Campbell and Hannigan had realized that the current method was limited to testing the students’ ability to comprehend plot, and “that’s standard for elementary and middle school kids. We should be spending our time talking about language, and so that’s what we do,” Campbell said.
Another innovative development came in the form of what they call TIES essays. Thematic, Investigation, Exposition, and Synthesis. They were essentially the equivalent of the modern-day AP English synthesis essay, before the modern-day AP English synthesis essay.
Today, AP Lang students are given a set of documents ranging from essays to political cartoons, hand-selected by a team organized by the College Board. Hannigan and Campbell did not have a team; they only had themselves. Yet, they were still able to create almost one hundred thematically unique sets of TIES documents, which they called bundles. Every bundle consisted of a full-length novel, a shorter, secondary novel, as well as a movie, song, and a piece of art. At the time, Hannigan and Campbell were ostracized by the department for their unorthodox ways of teaching, but were rarely ever stopped from using their methods because they had the evidence and research to prove that what they were doing worked.
Kalkat said that Hannigan teaches “you how to interact with literature [of] all kinds. [He saw] the value of learning from all sorts of different places.”
The amount of effort Hannigan and Campbell put into giving students the most effective learning experience was unmatched. According to the duo’s website, they did it because “we can’t do things the same ways they do them in other English Classes,” for they teach…
The World’s Greatest English Class (.com)
Worldsgreatestenglishclass.com was one of Hannigan and Campbell’s most innovative resources for the time. They were some of the first to use a website to host class materials.
These may be things we take for granted today, but we are so much more technically literate, being able to find most things with ease. Back then, it was much harder, so the fact that things like access to passages, lesson plans, summaries, rubrics, rhetorical devices, vocab words, bibliography makers, TIES essay bundles (found under “The World’s Greatest Outside Reading Project”), and so much more were accessible through one website made a world of difference for students.
Many other small enrichment novelties made the website feel especially alive. Noteworthy sections include embeds for “Article of the Day”, “This Day in History”, “Today’s Birthday”, “In The News”, “Question of the Day”, and hyperlinks to different word games like the daily crossword puzzle, all of which continue to be reflective of Hannigan’s curious mind.
Because of how ahead of their time they were, when Common Core began to evolve, Hannigan and Campbell had to change very little.
“Most people had to throw away all their assignments and do everything all over again,” Campbell said. “We were already there … The stuff we had done years before made us outcasts.” But after everyone caught up, they weren’t outcasts anymore.
In reference to actually being able to make these changes ahead of the curve, Campbell says, “I couldn’t have done it without [Hannigan].”
The Worldsgreatestenglishclass.com website is now defunct, but archives are still viewable through The Wayback Machine (https://web.archive.org/).
The Courier Newsroom
His English classrooms were not the only place that Hannigan taught in a nonconformist manner. Building off of his career at the Daily Review, he became the advisor for our very own James Logan Courier.
Roman Loyola is a senior editor for Macworld, an Apple-focused tech blog. Loyola had a different experience in Hannigan’s classroom. Going into high school, Roman had already chosen the path of becoming a writer. Rather than simply showing him writing was a viable path, Hannigan’s role instead was to be Roman’s guide in harnessing his skills.
“I didn’t know what kind of writing I wanted to do,” Loyola said. “Eventually, tech journalism started becoming a thing … I liked journalism, and I love tech, so I decided to get into that. That’s how I kind of got into the career that I have now, and Hannigan had a lot to do with that.”
But to eventually get his students like Loyola to become so passionate about Journalism, Hannigan needed to entice them—to challenge them. So, that’s exactly what he did, and not just in the academic way.
“Back then, The Courier had this reputation of stirring it up,” Loyola said.
In his sophomore year, The Courier published an exposé about the local gangs in Union City, attempting to showcase them as humans, and not villains that many people viewed them as.
The administration was not happy. Loyola explained, “It was a little more controversial than they were ready for.”
However, what stories like these did was set the standard for what The Courier stands for. When Loyola became editor in chief, he continued this advocacy, writing a story about the grueling process of making weight for wrestling meets. Again, the administration didn’t like it, but there was always someone to protect Loyola’s integrity.
“Hannigan had my back,” Loyola said – especially whenever the administration complained.
“Hannigan would say, ‘Okay, what’s wrong with the story? What’s factually wrong with the story?’ And the administration couldn’t really do anything,” Loyola said.
This way, Hannigan not only taught his students how to write well and enjoy the learning process, but to maintain integrity and fight for what they believed was right.
In fact, Hannigan’s work in The Courier fighting for student advocacy, at one point, almost ended a large part of his teaching career. Fariba Nawa, Logan class of 1992, remembers Hannigan’s commitment to student voice and student freedom.
“He really did give us a lot of freedom as a student newspaper,” Nawa said. “And that caused him to have problems,” Nawa remembered how she was encouraged to write about the truth, and looking back at it, it was her first look into her future job as an investigative journalist.
It was either 1991 or 1992. Nawa was dabbling in investigative journalism, giving voice to students who often didn’t get to speak for themselves. At this time, Hannigan had been on thin ice with the Logan administration.
“The last straw may have been that series I did on teen pregnancies about students at Logan who were pregnant and what they thought of being pregnant,” Nawa said. Hannigan’s safe space for controversial stories now had a target on its back.
“Hannigan stood by us the whole time,” Nawa said. “And he’s like, that’s fine. They want to fire me. But I’m not going to back down from what I believe, which is that we had the right to publish things we did.”
Hannigan did get removed as The Courier’s advisor that year, but by keeping true to his principles, he helped raise a generation of journalists who still speak truth to power to this day. One of them was Nawa herself. Prior to reporting in the Middle East and holding the powerful accountable, Nawa fought her first battle right at Logan.
“We went and fought back. We went to the city council, to the school board, all of us students,” Nawa said. “We loved him so much, and we loved having him as our teacher. But also, we thought he was good at his job. It wasn’t just about how we felt about it. It was what we were learning.”
Through the student’s fight, Hannigan was rehired as The Courier’s advisor and continued to spark curiosity and advocacy in his students.
Nawa remembers that while other teachers and administrators tried to hold her back, Hannigan was always in her corner.
“Hannigan told me I could. And that, you know, that made a big difference in my life,” Nawa said.
To this day, Fariba remembers what Hannigan instilled as a journalist.
“The core of who Hannigan was and what journalism meant to him is the same for both of us, which is you speak truth to power, and you hold the powerful accountable, and you allow differences to flourish as long as they don’t hurt people.”
Patrick Charles Hannigan…
Always made his students feel loved. The same heart with a curiosity for life and the world around him made sure the lives in front of him received that love.
“He wanted to make sure he reached his students. Especially the ones that he felt like needed it,” Loyola said.
In 1988, when Loyola graduated from Logan, there was a separate specialty awards ceremony for seniors before graduation. Students would gather, and of course, awards like valedictorian and salutatorian were handed out, but other awards for perfect attendance, school spirit, and excellence in particular subjects were given out as well.
“Mr. Hannigan created an award called the Outstanding Achievement in Journalism Award,” Loyola said. “He presented it to me my senior year.”
Coming after a year of many accomplishments, winning many regional journalism awards, and leading as Editor-in-Chief, it was well earned.
“Hannigan went up there and he kind of talked about all the things we achieved during the year,” Loyola said. “Then he stopped and he talked about how we [had] this relationship … how we become more than just student and pupil… how he considers me one of his best friends.”
Loyola was left at a loss for words. As he went to receive his award, he recounts holding back the urge to give him a hug, but given the fact that they were still student and teacher and the optics behind it, he refrained.
“A few years later, I was able to tell him how much it meant to me, so I was able to finally make up for that. I grew up a little bit and was able to finally do what I needed,” Loyola said. “To a lot of people, he meant a lot, and he meant a lot to me.”
Pat Hannigan’s relationship with Tim Campbell was the classic strong male friendship. Those jokes that ‘guy friends only need to see their best friends once every three years’ encapsulated their dynamic.
“Some years we didn’t see each other in the summer because I was busy and he was busy, and then we would just pick up, first day of the next year, just like nothing had happened,” Campbell said.
Of course, the duo still had great memories, travelling to places like New York and walking around campus together.
Campbell’s final story and remarks are a reminder to us all of the importance of those who bring so much joy into our lives.
“I miss him very much, and I wish I had made more effort to spend more time with him in the last few years,” Campbell said. “I mean, he retired, I had a baby, so we were busy with other things. We did see each other, but it wasn’t as much as I would like, and I wish I had made more of an effort.”
“I didn’t think he’d be gone so soon,” Campbell continued. “I’m retiring in a few years so I figured, ‘Hey, we’d both be retired and we can have our time together.’ My memories are great. I would have liked to have more… it could have been more.”
Few people like Mr. Hannigan are out there, so remember to cherish the Patrick Hannigan’s in your lives, and love them while they’re here. Make the memories, take those walks, and tell them you miss them. Tell them they matter and they have made a difference. Tell them the world is better because of them.
“There’s never enough,” Campbell said. “The time you spend with the people you love. There’s just never enough.”
Works Cited Campbell, Timothy, and Patrick Hannigan. “The World’s Greatest Outside Reading Project - TIES for English Two and Honors English Two.” The World’s Greatest English Class, 12 Sept. 2012, web.archive.org/web/20121117211740/worldsgreatestenglishclass.com/index.php?catid=29&blogid=1. Campbell, Timothy, and Patrick Hannigan. The World’s Greatest English Class, 02 Mar. 2010, https://web.archive.org/web/20100304083435/http://www.worldsgreatestenglishclass.com/ Soltau, Rebecca. “Has Logan Live Hit An All-Time Low?” The James Logan Courier “Has Logan Live Hit An All-Time Low?,” 17 May 2008, web.archive.org/web/20080517092116/jameslogancourier.org/index.php?itemid=3773. Patrick Hannigan Obituary - Walnut Creek, CA, neptunesociety.com/obituaries/walnut-creek-ca/patrick-hannigan-12759000. Accessed 14 Apr. 2026. Patrick Hannigan Profile, www.facebook.com/patrick.hannigan.77/. Accessed 14 Apr. 2026.
