As the high school humanities teacher at The Denver Waldorf School, Eric Mills teaches students to become clear, independent thinkers who know how to ask better questions and think more clearly about our increasingly complex world. An award-winning teacher and mentor with international classroom experience, Mills’s courses move through history, storytelling, race, and gender, encouraging students to read closely, think critically, and notice how ideas quietly, and sometimes loudly, shape the world around them.

Before coming to The Denver Waldorf School in 2018, Eric taught college courses in literature and writing and then spent many years teaching English in Denver Public Schools. During that time, he served as chair of the Humanities department, teacher leader for student council, and director of the district-wide Denver Public Schools Poetry Slam. In 2015, he was nominated for the Mayor’s Award for Arts and Excellence in Culture. Along the way, he also worked with education nonprofits across Colorado, supporting programs centered on youth voice, literacy, and equitable financing for the arts. He also served on the board of directors for City Park Jazz, where he worked to bring student voices to the forefront of the performances, helping steward one of Denver’s most beloved community music traditions.

Mills holds bachelor’s degrees in philosophy and English, a master’s degree in twentieth-century American literature and literary theory, and is currently completing a Ph.D. in literary studies at the University of Denver. His doctoral research traces the decline of the great house in the Victorian novel as it crossed the Atlantic. Long before all of this, he spent a stretch of his professional life in a cubicle organizing large amounts of linguistic data, an experience that taught him more than he expected about patience, patterns, and how to use technology for the good of human connection.

Outside of the classroom, Eric has always enjoyed working with his hands as much as with ideas. Before turning fully to teaching, he remodeled houses, learning firsthand how structures fail, endure, and occasionally surprise. A classically trained pianist, he now prefers strumming a guitar with his children, often between ongoing repairs to his 130-year-old Denver home, which continues to be both a lesson and a loving companion.