Anyone who has encountered Mr. Dom Mingione in the classroom knows that he is one of a kind.

“He is like no other. He is like a brilliant scholar wrapped up in a Jerry Seinfeld, humorous personality,” said Ms. Karen Kosch, a history teacher at PV.

Mingione is a retired American History/U.S. I and a Constitutional Law teacher, founder of the Religion in America class, and coach of the golf team here at PV. Now that he has retired after teaching for 34 years, he has more time on his hands to read his favorite types of books, which are mystery/detective and historical novels.

“I retired because I had gotten to the point where grading the papers was becoming increasingly a chore and I couldn’t do it at night anymore because I was falling asleep,” Mingione said. “So I would get up at 4:30 in the morning and grade papers, and that gets old when you get up and it’s dark, and you get back from work and it’s still dark. So, I decided that the last two or three years, that I really wasn’t enjoying that part of the job anymore. But it is a necessary part of the job; you can’t not do it. If it was just a matter of teaching the classes, I would still be doing that. I still miss the class interaction.”

Mingione retired in the end of the 2006 school year, but still returns to make appearances in the Religion in America class. It is currently taught by Kosch, although he is the founder. He also still coaches the PV golf team.

“Mrs. Kosch asked me to teach a certain section of the course for her, and that’s still a lot of fun. But, I don’t have to take attendance, I don’t have to grade papers, you know, you just come in and deliver the instructions, and I get all the good stuff without having to do all the painful stuff.”

Mingione didn’t have one specific thing that roped him into teaching. In his sophmore year of college, he considered teaching as a possible career. Only later did he realize how much he enjoyed it.

Mr. Matt Morone, a PV English teacher, was one of Mingione’s students when he was a student here at PV.

“He would have lunch with me,” Morone explained. “We would go get lunch in the center of town and sit in the park and talk about life. It was great. The conversations that shaped who I am, like as a teacher. He was part of the reason that I went into teaching. He didn’t do anything by the book. Everything was, all the information he was teaching, all the lessons he was teaching, they were all filtered through his nature and his perspective. He was really good at getting a whole bunch of high school students who weren’t sure about themselves, to talk passionately about issues.”

“He is very kind and he is very funny,” Morone said. “He is also very inquisitive. He would like challenging ideas that students had or that the society had; it was important to him. You had to look at where history is coming from, he was very good at that. And he was very effective with getting us to think about this.”

However, Morone is not the only teacher who has been inspired  by Mingione’s teaching and unique perspectives.

“He is my mentor,” Kosch said. “He was a mentor to most of us in our department all the years that he was here. He is a really humble guy with a really good sense of humor. At heart, he is just a really good teacher. He likes to share what he has a passion for. He likes to help other learn and help others grow. So to me, he is my mentor, he is my friend, and for him to still come into the class for us and to volunteer his time every year for the first week or two of the class shows how much he still loves what he does.”

Kosch continued, “He still walks into a class with these people who don’t even know him, he wins them over in a matter of seconds, because people just see what I see in him, this genuine teacher who loves kids, who has passion for his subject; he captures them. Its amazing, its magic.

“I think Pascack Valley is a better place because he spent his career here.”