Joy Bliss This E-Book

William Quigley

• Herausgeber: IndieGo Publishing
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 511

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

In his book Joy Bliss This, William Quigley tells the story of becoming a teacher, a journey he never planned to take, and one that was filled with repeated failure from the start. At his lowest point, when he had fallen the farthest and needed the most help, his students were the ones who saved him. In that redemption, he found a way to make a positive impact on the world through teaching, and he learned the ultimate lesson, that excellence is what we are here for. In being lost and finding his way, William’s teaching adventure serves as a guidepost and guardrail for your own journey toward excellence. We are our stories; this is his. Come along with him. The adventure is calling. Let’s begin!

Leseprobe

Joy

Bliss

THIS

A teacher’s journey

WILLIAM QUIGLEY

Joy Bliss THIS

Copyright © 2018 William Quigley

Paperback ISBN 9781946824110

Hardcover ISBN 9781946824127

Ebook ISBN 9781946824134

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be copied or stored without the author and publisher’s permission.

Editing, Interior Design, and Cover Concept:

Janet Angelo of INDIEGO PUBLISHING

Cover Design by Kura Carpenter

www.kuracarpenterdesign.com

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017962610

Publisher’s Cataloging-In-Publication Data

(Prepared by The Donohue Group, Inc.)

Names: Quigley, William, 1969-

Title: Joy bliss this : a teacher's journey / William Quigley.

Description: [Florida] : IndieGo Publishing LLC, [2018]

Identifiers: ISBN 9781946824110 (paperback) | ISBN 9781946824127 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781946824134 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Quigley, William, 1969---Career in education. | Teachers--Biography. | Teaching. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Educators. | EDUCATION / Professional Development. | EDUCATION / Teaching Methods & Materials / Social Science.

Classification: LCC LB885.Q542 J69 2018 (print) | LCC LB885.Q542 (ebook) | DDC 370.92--dc23

Published in the United States of America by

INDIEGO PUBLISHING LLC

Think Indie. Go Create. Publish.

www.indiegopublishing.com

_____________________

Saint Thomas More:

“Why not be a teacher? You’d be a fine teacher, perhaps a great one.”

Richard Rich:

“If I was, who would know it?”

Saint Thomas More:

“You, your pupils, your friends, God. Not a bad public that.”

~ A Man for all Seasons, Robert Bolt

_____________________

We are on a journey to keep an appointment with whoever we are.

~ Gene Roddenberry

_____________________

Drive away and try to keep smiling. Get a little rock and roll on the radio and go toward all the life there is with all the courage you can muster. Be true; be brave; stand. All the rest is darkness.

~ IT, Stephen King

_____________________

Dedication

_________________________________________

To my first teachers, my parents, who taught me all the lessons that helped to make me the man and teacher I am.

To my brothers and sisters, who have always been on this journey with me, thank you for being the best.

To all the colleagues, the great teachers, the leaders, the comforters of kids, thank you for being my friends and my guides. I have seen excellence in so many, but I especially must acknowledge Linda Gass, Carter Hannah, Roseanne Ganim, Sue Cooper-Smith, and Carrie Hyacinth.

To my mentors, especially Jeanne Kurth, Elfie Israel, and Debbie Tabie, you were the standard, the excellence I sought.

To the great leaders who always encouraged excellence in me, especially Frankie St. James and Peter Bayer.

To all my friends, especially Nat, Sean, and Tracy, who were always there for me and have always pushed me to be better.

To my editor and publisher, Janet Angelo, for making my words shine, and for becoming my friend.

And to my students, all the names, the faces, the souls, the kids who have blessed my life, I am nothing unless I am your teacher. You’ve made my life. I’ve learned far more from you than I ever taught you, and I owe you more thanks, more appreciation, than language can express. When my teaching career is over and I look back on my life, I will be able to say with nothing but pure, deep, joyful pride, “I was a teacher!”

Thank you for letting me be yours.

A Note from the Author

_________________________________________

We are our stories and the journeys we’ve had. We are made up of millions of moments filled with people, places, and experiences. This book is the story of all the things that have impacted my journey as a teacher and brought me from where I was to where I am. I give this account to understand where I have been, but also to help you have a better understanding of what I know to be true about kids, teaching, and education. I hope that in some meaningful way I can make your journey easier.

Of course my journey is not yours; you may be reading this in a different state, a different country, and probably a different era than the one during which I honed my craft as a teacher. Though the place, the journey, and the era may be different, I hope our goal has been the same: the search for excellence. Though I do not claim to have found it, I do know that excellence is the destination, and I believe the things that have happened to me can serve as signposts to you, to help you on your journey.

A career in education was never the journey I expected to take. I never expected that the things that happened to me, both good and bad, would happen.

I never imagined the kind of teacher I would become or the kind of classroom I would have.

I always knew I would be good at conveying information, but I never expected the kids to like me.

I never expected that I would care far more about my kids as people than the subject matter I taught.

I never expected any of this, but I am glad for the journey. I am grateful for what I have learned, and I can look back at the dark places and see how they lit my path toward the man I would become.

In the end, we are our stories, and this is mine.

William Quigley

Joy, Bliss, THIS

____________________________________________

My Journey

Endings, Beginnings, and the Ends of Beginnings

A Saint Named Leo Shows Me the Way

Teaching Internship: Good, Bad, and Ugly

Andrew Churns, Destroys, and Makes an Impact

A Rabbi, a Pastor, and a Clueless Teacher

The Infamous Letter Incident

Teaching in the Conch Republic

Respect Is the Key

This Is My Truth

Karen, a Stuffed Monkey, and the Story

The Specialness of Key Largo School

Monsters Both Real and Imagined

Accidentally Finding Home

What John Taught Me

The Year of the D

9/11/11

School for Sale

Your Journey

So You Want to Be a Great Teacher

Work on Yourself

Being the Best YOU

Work on the Class

Transcending Mediocrity

Work on the Work

The Right Tools for the Job

Teaching Is More than Testing

Learning Styles as Unique as Kids Are

Our Journey as Teachers

My Journey

_____________________

Endings, Beginnings, and the Ends of Beginnings _________________________________________

The day before winter break in 1993, a meeting took place in the office of my principal, Frankie St. James. Outside the sun was shining, a glorious winter day in South Florida. Inside, the atmosphere in the room was the opposite — cold and bleak. Attending the meeting were five people: the two teachers who had mentored me since August, the school’s two assistant principals, and the principal. All five were caring and dedicated educational professionals. All were people I greatly admired. Each was an excellent example of great teaching and leadership. All of them worked tirelessly inside the classroom and in the making of a school for the best interest of kids and teachers. I had turned to these dedicated coworkers when I needed advice and guidance. Each had cared about me and helped me, and had gone out of their way to assist me on my journey.

I was not present, but I was the subject of the meeting. They were discussing whether I should be fired.

And the truth is, I should have been.

I had been in almost every way possible a complete failure as a teacher, not just failing in the ways so many new teachers do but in completely new and novel ways.

I was boring. My lessons were dull. I lectured hour after droning hour and called it teaching. Kids fell asleep in my class or worse, they acted out, and honestly, when they did, how could I blame them? I didn’t have the skill or the ability to make my class the passionate and vital place it deserved to be. I was teaching block schedule classes which meant each period was nearly 90 minutes long; this coupled with no idea how to really engage and involve kids led to disaster.

I had no control, no classroom discipline. I didn’t have the faintest idea how to get a group of thirteen-year-olds to listen. Though my classroom was never chaos, it was also never really in control.

As an example of my lack of control, let me introduce you to one of my students. I will call her Karen. Karen had nothing but contempt for me. My class was so boring that she made her own excitement. She talked back; she yelled things out; she asked inappropriate questions. I responded in the best way I knew how, which was to confront, respond haltingly, answer shaking with anger, turn beet red, and challenge her in front of her peers.

These daily confrontations were some of the few times the class seemed to wake from their stupor and pay attention to what was happening.

Our school had an in-school suspension program, and whenever a student acted up, we teachers sent the student to this “class.” For several weeks straight I sent Karen out every single day. The ultimate example of my lack of ability to manage my class took place one day when I was going on and on about the settlement of the American West circa 1880. I had placed Karen in the back of the room and surrounded her with my very best male students. On this day, I noticed that the boys were all looking at her. I left my lectern and hurried over to where she sat. When I got there, she was sliding a pen in and out of her mouth making slurping, sucking sounds, and just as I approached, she looked at each of the boys and asked, “Okay, who’s next?”

Of course I threw her out of the class.

In each of my six classes, I had students who were like Karen: they ran the class, and I had no idea how to get them to stop. What is worse, the good kids were getting cheated out of an education.

As the meeting in my principal’s office progressed, all of my failures during the first half of the year were talked about openly. They hashed out each of the times and situations when administration had been alerted to my classroom failures. They were well aware of the number of times kids had been thrown out of my class. They knew all about my lack of control and how poor a job I was doing trying to control my classes.

My lack of control was only matched by the lack of quality teaching that was going on in my classroom.

There was another cloud, never mentioned, but it hung over every word spoken in the meeting that day. There had been other good reasons, since my first week of school, to wonder about my fitness as a teacher.

I am so glad those reasons weren’t discussed openly with me there, because I would have simply died, died, died if they had been.

I have always been self-critical to a fault. It would have crushed me to hear my own words presented to me as an accusation, to sit through the list of my professional failures, and to hear a litany of all the mistakes I had made. It would be several years later that I would be told about the meeting at all. And even though by then I had figured out how to do the things I had so readily failed at as a new teacher, I would grow red with embarrassment at the memory of that impotent time and my inability to do this job.

I should have been fired.

Five months of futility and a nearly complete lack of success had culminated two days prior with an event that led to this meeting to discuss my fate.

I was attending the middle school Holiday/Christmas band and choir performance. I had been a band student during my middle and high school years. To this day, my favorite school memories are of my time spent in marching and symphonic band. It was exciting to be on the other side, to sit in the audience, to be a teacher of the kids performing. The performance was everything middle school band is: a few squeaks, lots of sharp and flat notes, the sounds of young voices singing sweet familiar carols, and tons of proud parents.

In one of the last pieces the highest middle school band played, they featured each of the sections of the band, and when each section came up in the song, that part of the band stood up, played several bars, and received attention, applause, and happy parent smiles from the audience. The piece played on, with each group receiving their moment, and as the flute section got ready to play, one of the musicians got her foot caught on something and with a loud crash fell back hard into her chair. There was an audible gasp from the audience. The girl (we’ll call her Betty) was one of my students. Betty was like many middle school girls, self-conscious, growing into her body, very sweet, very quiet, and she turned bright red as her friends helped her up so they could play their feature piece.

Without any more disturbances, the band completed the performance, the chorus sang, and the night was filled with the sounds of Christmas.

As I mentioned earlier, the school was on a block schedule, which meant I taught eight classes but only saw four of them on any given day: one day I would see four, the next day I would see the remaining four and then the following day back to the first four and so on.

It so happened that the next day was Betty’s class. It was the last time I would see her before winter break.

It was a relaxing school day, with not a lot going on, and at the end of each class, I stood up to talk to the kids. I congratulated them on getting through the first half of the school year, telling them how much I appreciated all the work they had done and how good it had been to get to know them.

When it came to the end of Betty’s class, I started with my usual spiel about how the year had gone so far, but I decided at the end to deviate from my script:

“This whole school year I expected you to fall down and fail, but I guess Betty did that for you last night.” The moment the words left my mouth, I wanted to take them back. I looked at the class and then at Betty expecting them to laugh, but instead they gasped, and Betty’s face was turning brighter and brighter red. I gulped and started to speak again, stumbled and finished going through the usual goodbye blather that I had used in my other classes, and every time I looked over at Betty, I could see her getting more and more upset, a growing horrible look of utter and complete embarrassment suffusing her expression. As I was about to finish speaking, she stood up and ran from room. I was shocked, and I reacted by violating every rule of teaching by taking off after her. The bell had not rung, there were several minutes remaining of class time, but I left my students unsupervised and ran after her.

My classroom was in a portable at the back of the school, and as I came down the walkway from my portable, I saw Betty headed straight for the front office a few hundred feet away.

She got to the doors before me and threw them open just as the bell rang.

I entered the office lobby and looked around for her but all the visitor seats were unoccupied. I entered the swinging door that led to the back administrative offices. Room by room, office by office, I peeked in trying to find her. I can only imagine how crazed I must have looked to these people as I searched franticly for her.

As I got near the back of the building, I heard sounds of sniffling coming from the very end of the hall. I knew whose office this was, and what I heard next made my stomach drop with the worst dread I had ever felt as a teacher.

“Oh, Auntie, he was so horrible.” This was followed by another wrenching sob. Something was mumbled, and then the words I had said to her in class came out of this sweet child’s mouth.

I stopped dead in my tracks.

No one had to tell me how bad this was.

Until that moment, I had no idea I was teaching the principal’s niece. I did not know how thin the ice I was standing on was, but I could feel this coldness creep over me, this clammy coldness of just what a terrible thing I had done. I was in much more trouble than just one stupid cruel statement.

I walked in and opened my mouth to speak and to make the best apology I could, but one look from the principal told me it would be better if I just left, so I did. I turned and walked out without a word.

That afternoon, the meeting took place.

As the group talked, it became obvious that I had to go. I had made too many mistakes, and I needed to be fired. I needed to be gone.

But I wasn’t.

In the end, two things saved me. One of them was my own doing, but the other was not something I directly controlled.

As the meeting went on and all of my failures were put on the table, only one thing was said in my favor: from the moment I started teaching, I vowed to be good at it. Instinctively, I knew that to get better, I had to seek out people who could guide me, and I had done just that. At some point, I had asked everyone in that room for help. In little and big ways I had never stopped asking, pleading, imploring that I needed help figuring out how to do this job better.

I am certain that I drove my superiors crazy with my constant need for help and guidance. I had spent hours sitting with the very people in this meeting, the ones who would determine my fate as a teacher, listening to their advice, their stories, anything they were willing to share as to how they perfected their art. I went to workshops and sat there wanting to be as good as the presenters. When things went badly in my classroom, I didn’t hide from people with more experience than me; on the contrary, I sought them out, anyone with advice, anyone who could point me in the right direction, anyone who would listen. I tried everything they suggested with the hope that it would work. I was open, ready to be guided and taught.

For the first five years of my teaching career, I stumbled, bumbled, failed, and flailed. I was a failure. I was in the dark, bumping around knocking down chairs and desks, and worst of all, I knocked down some kids in the process. But — and this was the one thing that saved me — I constantly asked for help, over and over and over: “Help me. I want to be better. I want to be good. I’ll do whatever you suggest, just please help me.”

That attitude is what helped save me from being fired that day, but in the end, it isn’t what saved my teaching career. What did was when one of the two teachers who had mentored me spoke up and defended me in that meeting.

And here I will name Jeanne Kurth, because she deserves so much of the credit for me becoming the teacher I am today. I cannot sing Jeanne’s praises loudly, strongly, or long enough. When I was at the lowest points of my teaching career, she put out her hand and raised me up. She fought for me, defended me, spoke for me. If it weren’t for her, I would have left teaching, and I have no idea what would have become of me. A line from the movie Titanic does better to express what Jeanne did for me, far better than I could (with a slight pronoun change): “You see, she saved me in every way a person can be saved.” And she did. From the moment I met her till this day, I owe her everything. As you will see, her saving me was not just in that fateful meeting but in others sprinkled throughout my first year of teaching. When she spoke for me, she sent the message that I was salvageable, that they needed to give me a chance. “Don’t fire him,” she told them, “and he will become a success.”

Somehow, it was enough.

A Saint Named Leo Shows Me the Way _________________________________________

The ironic part of my journey is that I never aspired to be a teacher. I went to college specifically not to be a teacher. I thought anyone who taught for a living was wasting his or her time. Ever since I was a little kid, I had known — heck, everyone had known — that I was destined to be a lawyer, but not just any lawyer. I was going to work in law for a while to gain some experience, and then I would pull out the big guns: I would run for political office and win. Based on what the twenty-year-old me believed, I should be deciding right now whether to run for governor, the Senate, or the Presidency.

I loved to argue. I loved politics. I loved law. I loved history. I watched presidential debates the way people watch sporting events. One of the proudest days of my entire childhood was waking up early in March 1988, having turned eighteen the previous November, to vote in the presidential primary. This was the world I wanted, the adrenalin rush of politics, and all the power and status that comes with that world. I was ready to get out there and shake all kinds of dirty hands, and scratch your back if you scratched mine, as long as you gave me a leg up in politics, all for the benefit of society, of course.

Be a teacher? HAH! What a waste — a waste of an education, a waste of a life, a waste of talent. Besides, when you’re a teacher, who benefits? Kids like me who didn’t see the value in teaching. On top of that, I’d be poor, unknown, unimportant — the definition of everything that a well-lived American life is not supposed to be.

These were the reasons I told myself that I had no interest in being a teacher, but the real reason I resisted wouldn’t reveal itself until I finally walked into a classroom as a college student to learn how to be a teacher.

Just as I had always known what I wanted to do with my life, I also knew from a very young age where I would go to college.

I had for years dreamed of the College of William and Mary. This was Thomas Jefferson’s college, in stately Colonial Williamsburg, a place of brick, cobblestones, and ivy: the definition in my mind of what a college should look like. I researched the school and knew exactly what GPA they wanted in an incoming freshman, what SAT score I needed, and everything else that was required to get in. All throughout high school, I focused on this one college, and finally, after four years of hard dedicated work, I knew I was everything they wanted. I was so obsessed with William and Mary that when I started my senior year of high school, it was the only college I intended to apply to.

The day I sent off my college application, the future, my life, was set. I would be a William and Mary undergraduate, Ivy League for law school, and the White House sometime after that. Quigley 2008, or 2012, or 2016, or….

As I waited for William and Mary to send my acceptance letter, it never dawned on me for a moment that I wouldn’t get in.

One day, while I was shrouded in my certainty and going on and on about it, my mom came to speak with me about her doubts. She told me that my father and she were concerned. What if I wasn’t accepted at William and Mary? (My God, was that a possibility?) They had decided they wanted me to apply to a Florida college; they didn’t care which one, but I needed to apply to a college in-state. After resisting and telling her that she knew that the only college I wanted to go to was William and Mary, and that of course I was going to be accepted, I gave in.

Fine. Whatever. Who cares? I’ll apply to some Florida school to make my parents happy, but it doesn’t matter — I know what college I’m going to, and I know my future!

When I was a kid, there was no internet, and thus no quick and easy way to research colleges like we can do today. The only way to find out about schools and their requirements were books that described the profiles of colleges, and what they were looking for in the students they admitted.

So the next day I walked into my school’s library and asked the librarian if there was a book specifically of Florida colleges and universities. She said yes, pulled it down from the shelf, and gave it to me.

When I tell my students this story, they look at me with mild fascination, curiosity, and horror. To have to look up a college in a book, and not to be able to go to their website where you can see videos of what the college looks like, email students who go there, see pictures and testimonials on tons of chat websites — to them this is just too incredible to believe.

Now, how to do this, to pick a college I would not be attending? When I researched William and Mary, I had spent hours looking through books, reading everything I could get my hands on to make sure it was the right college for me. But this just felt like a waste of time.

And so, I didn’t even sit at a desk, I just put the book down and said to myself, Whatever page I open the book to, that’s the school I will apply to. Because who cares? I’m going to William and Mary. This is just to make my parents happy.

So I did just that.

I put the book on a tabletop.

I opened the book — to the page for Saint Leo College.

Never heard of it? Me neither!

But who cares? I was going to William and Mary. This was just to make my parents happy.

I wrote down the information, and when I got home, I quickly typed a letter saying I was interested in the school. They responded with some material I didn’t read, but I filled out the application without giving it much thought and mailed it to them

So I had applied to Saint Leo College. Where was it, anyway? Didn’t matter. Why? William and Mary. What kind of school was it? Didn’t matter. Why? William and Mary. What kind of degrees did it offer, was it public or private, how old was it, what was its history, how big was the campus, how many males attended, how many females, what were the dorms like, what traditions did they have? IT DIDN’T MATTER. Why? WILLIAM AND MARY!

To this day, I think Saint Leo knew I was applying even before I applied. It seemed to me that within a day of sending in the application, I got my acceptance letter.

But again, who cares? I was going to William and Mary. This was just to make my parents happy.

That’s when the phone calls started.

Saint Leo: “Mr. Quigley, we would like to offer you a partial scholarship.”

Me: “Thank you very much, but I’m going to William and Mary.”

A few days later . . .

Saint Leo: “We would like to offer you a full scholarship.”

Hmm . . . William and Mary, in Virginia, $30,000-plus for tuition . . . hmm.

Me: “Thank you very much, but I’m going to William and Mary.”

Saint Leo: “How about room and board? We can offer you free room and board.”

Hmm . . . William and Mary, in Virginia, $30,000-plus for tuition plus $15,000 for room and board every year for four years, that’s $200,000 . . . hmm.

Me: “Thank you very much, but I’m going to William and Mary.”

Saint Leo: “And we can give you a job on campus.”

Hmm . . . William and Mary, in Virginia, $30,000-plus for tuition and $15,000 for room and board for four years, that’s $200,000, and I don’t live in Virginia, so I would have to travel from Florida to Virginia each semester, and of course there are books and supplies, and then of course, eventually law school . . . hmm.

And most importantly, I have four siblings, and my parents had no money to help me pay for any of it, no matter where I ended up going to school.

It was right about this time that I got the letter from William and Mary.

It had become my habit to check the mail daily. When I opened the mailbox that afternoon, my heart stopped. There it was, embossed with the beautiful emblem of the vaunted College of William and Mary. Suddenly, I was terrified. Holding it in my hand, that letter felt like a precious and fragile life-changing gift.

I dumped the other mail onto the kitchen counter and walked into my bedroom clutching the letter. I sat down on my bed and tried to work up the courage to open it. What if they said no? My whole world and four years was in my hand.

At some point, the fear, hope, and anxiety got the best of me, and I just had to open it.

The letter was written on thick, clean, crisp paper, just the sort of paper William and Mary would use, I thought. I took a deep breath, unfolded it, and looked at the opening sentence. I will never forget the first few words:

“Congratulations, William Quigley, you have been accepted . . .”

I made it, did it, got in, my dream, in my hands, it was everything, every, every, everything! All my dreams, the hopes of my life burned brightly like the pure flame of knowing every step of my own path — the man I would be, the lawyer I would become, the elections I would campaign for and win.

IT WAS EVERYTHING.

Me: “Thank you, Saint Leo, yes, I’ve decided to come to your college.”

I put down the phone.

Why I did it was simple.

My parents had no money. I had no money. Besides, the ultimate goal had not changed. I was going to be a lawyer, so my choice of undergraduate school didn’t matter. I would go to William and Mary Law School. I would take Saint Leo’s money and their degree and still make my dreams come true.

But I still had no clue as to where or even really what Saint Leo College was. What if I had taken their money and made the worst possible mistake?

Turns out I had nothing to worry about. Saint Leo was exactly what I needed in a college. It was so small that it had fewer students than my high school, South Dade High. It was situated near the city of Tampa but far enough away that it felt remote and separated. It was in one of the few areas of Florida that actually has hills.

Saint Leo was also an intriguing mix of old and new. Yes, the school was only a hundred years old (during my time there it celebrated its 100th anniversary), which is not old by the rest of the country’s standards, but by Florida standards, it’s ancient. The school had not always been a four-year college. At first it was a prep school, then a two-year college, then a four-year college, and finally a four-year university.

The very center of the school housed administrative buildings on one side and the oldest dorms on campus on the other. Between them spanned a beautiful lawn of lush green grass and ancient moss-covered oak trees where you would often find kids lounging or playing Frisbee. To the east of this central point was the student center where the school cafeteria was and then beyond that three dorm buildings. South of the dorms were the two main classroom buildings and the front entrance to the college. To the west of the school center was the old Saint Leo Church that also housed the monastery. A bridge connected the largest part of campus to two more buildings of girls-only dorms, and beyond that the nunnery and the small chapel that was used by students for Sunday services. The entire school sat along the banks of Lake Jovita and was bordered to the east and west by orange groves. Directly to the west was the city of San Antonio, and to the east was the much larger town of Dade City.

It was a sleepy and quiet place, a perfect place for someone who felt a pull to a particular place and a particular future, and who needed the time to rethink both.

Saint Leo was also a desperate place. Situated forty-five miles northeast of Tampa, a little more than an hour from Orlando, it was a forgettable stop off Interstate 75, a school searching for a reason to be. It was literally nowhere geographically, and it was going nowhere as a university.

For my entire adult life, I’ve had to explain where Saint Leo is located: yes, it is in Florida, and yes, I know you have never heard of it. It was a school in search of an identity. It desperately wanted to be a top-flight liberal arts college, to attract great students and to make itself grow and matter. The population of the college had dipped dramatically in the years before and during my time there. The majority of its financial support was from the satellite campuses situated on military bases throughout the world.

The school had embarked on an ambitious plan to improve its standing. They had created an honors college and had aggressively put money into giving scholarships to the best-qualified students who applied. Saint Leo was trying hard to buck its well-earned reputation as a school of last resort. In the northeast, Saint Leo was considered the college you could get into when you couldn’t get in anywhere else. To the locals, it was a rich preppy school for kids who weren’t even sure they wanted to go to college. The school had no identity and no name recognition. Even people in the Tampa Bay area did not know of its existence.

When I visited Saint Leo in the spring of my senior year, I felt completely at home as I walked around the campus. It just felt right as my parents and I explored the school. I could see myself at this place. There was one large lecture hall at Saint Leo, and it was empty when we entered it. My father took that moment to sit me down and have a conversation with me. “You can be anything you want to be here, son. You’re a tabula rasa, a blank slate. No one will know you, you will know no one, so come here and just be whoever you want to be.”

It was what I needed to hear. I wanted so badly to throw off the skin of the person I had been. I had always found it uncomfortable being around kids my own age. I found the give and take, the process of making friends incredibly difficult. I had tired of being the nerd, the loner, the quiet one. I was ready to go someplace where I could start over. The great thing about places like Saint Leo is they allow you to be the proverbial big fish in the small pond.

The moment I got to Saint Leo as a brand-new freshman, I immersed myself in student life. I joined the Pre-Law Society, Campus Ministry, helped to co-create the Young Republicans, became a justice on the Student Court, and became a writer and eventually the editor of the college newspaper. I loved being involved, and most importantly, being known. That was one of the giant advantages of going to a small school. Everyone knew everyone.

I also knew my professors by name. Not only that, I went to their houses, drank with them, partied with them, got drunk with them, and more importantly, I got to know them as people. In one memorable occasion, I lay in bed and discussed sex with my Philosophy of Love professor in his bed with my girlfriend at the time, the three of us discussing love and sex and being young and free. I felt completely comfortable sitting in professors’ offices learning about life even as I was learning whatever material they were teaching.

My fellow students were equally great; again, the thing about a small college is that students cling to each other. Sure, there were campus cliques, but it was completely common to be at a party with every kind of kid of every background and every interest. I had a close friend who was a frat guy, another who was one of the leading actors on campus, a third who was an amazing artist, another who was the devoutly religious leader of the Campus Ministry program. I would float from a group of artists, to a group of religious kids, to my fellow tennis players, to a mixed table.

At Saint Leo, I fell in love for the first time and had my heart broken the first time. Had my first real kiss and took the first few steps to finding what kind of emotional and sexual life I wanted. I explored and learned at Saint Leo.

I learned and grew so much in that place. I grew up there. I became a man there. I met so many great and wonderful and good people there. I had a series of passionate and caring educators. I had fun, silly fun, getting stupid drunk, being crazy, running across campus. I entered Saint Leo as an English major (it was part of the scholarship that Saint Leo gave me) but quickly changed it to pre-law, a program that has disappeared at most colleges today but then it meant taking lots of history and political science courses.

I loved my classes, but more than that, I loved my professors. Most of the classes I took were taught by one of two professors: Dr. McGee and Dr. Horgan. They taught what it meant to understand social science; they gave me discipline and taught me the ways of a historian. They showed me that history is not a series of facts or disparate events but rather a series of choices, of connections, of lessons, and if you find the thread, you can see the past, the present, and the future in a unique way.

I owe my interest in these subjects to my father. From an early age, I had been immersed in history, government, and politics. It was common at the dinner table to discuss the politics of the day or the history of a thousand years ago. I am so grateful to my father for instilling in me that passion. I’m even more grateful to the two patient and passionate educators I met at Saint Leo who helped me take that interest and understand the academic study of it.

Teaching Internship: Good, Bad, and Ugly

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I had a clear idea of what I wanted for my life: college, law school, law practice, meet a girl, get married, and enter politics. There was no telling how far I would rise!

And that would have been my life had it not been for my parents.

Two times in my life, my parents intervened, and by doing so, they completely changed the direction of my life. The first happened when my mother insisted that I apply to a Florida college. This led me to Saint Leo. The second happened at the end of my sophomore year at Saint Leo, but this time, my father stepped in and changed everything.

As I prepared to return to Saint Leo for my junior year, my father expressed a concern that he and my mother had about my future. They were worried that by picking pre-law, I was setting myself up for possible problems.

The conversation began with a very simple question: “What if you don’t want to become a lawyer? What if at the end of four years, you graduate with a pre-law degree, and you don’t want to go to law school? What job can that get you?”

I listened with the same open mind and gave the same rational thoughtful response that I had given my mother two years before when she wanted me to apply to a Florida college.

I didn’t want to do it. I knew I was going to law school. End of story. No fear. No worry. Stupid question. Stupid conversation.

My father continued. “We are just worried that you won’t have skills or anything that could possibly get you a job when you finish college if you change your mind about being a lawyer.”

I responded again that I knew my path and knew what I wanted. I had spent two years at Saint Leo, gotten straight As, and each political science or history class I had taken had reinforced my career goals.

My dad pulled out the ultimate argument, the parent card.

“We are helping you pay for college, you live here in the summer, and this is something we want you to do.”

I had no comeback for that. He was right.

What I didn’t know at the time was there was another reason my father felt so strongly about this. One of my father’s greatest embarrassments and failures drove him to have this conversation with me. Years ago, he had gone to college with a specific trajectory in mind. For him it was medicine. But like so much of my father’s life, it meandered away from where he wanted to go. Part of it wasn’t his fault; his father died during his freshman year at Kent State, so out of necessity, he had to quit for a brief period. But the larger fault was his: he studied botany, biology, chemistry, sociology, psychology, history, and by the end of six years, he had many credits but nothing that would actually give him a degree. So he left without one. It haunted him the rest of his life. It contained and controlled his life, and prevented him from ascending in his professional life.

He was expressing this fear without naming it.

I agreed to my parents’ wishes, and I went back to college with the intent to take some classes that would fulfill my father’s wish but that would not interfere with my goals.

I knew from the get-go that science was out. I had always struggled with the subject. It was the only C I had gotten in high school. I had already taken the one required science credit in college and was done with the subject forever. So there went nursing, engineering, medicine, and every other career that required science classes to earn a degree.

I considered business, but the truth was I just never could see myself as a businessperson, owning or running a business or working as a manager in some cubicle world. Worse yet, I feared becoming some mid-level go-nowhere administrator, the twenty-fifth vice-president of some lame company that no one knew or cared about.

How about accounting? Unlike science, I had always been a good if unremarkable math student. I loved statistics and keeping track of things. But the thought of spending my life adding up other people’s money seemed horrible to me. It wasn’t that I expected to be rich. I always somehow knew that even as a lawyer, it was not likely that my life would be about riches, but if you’d asked how I felt about fame — well, that was a different story. You couldn’t be an un-famous President of the United States.

I was stymied. What to do?

And then, a conversation with a fellow member of the newspaper staff led me in the direction that would change my life. Dan told me he had taken an introduction to education class and really loved it. It had gotten him seriously thinking about being a teacher.

“Teaching?” I shot back. “No way!” I had no interest in wasting my life teaching a bunch of kids.

But then he said the thing that convinced me to take the class. He told me it was easy.

Cool! Make my dad happy.

Easy A.

I’m going to be a lawyer anyway.

So I signed up for Introduction to Education.

It’s such a laughable title for a class. If there is anything any kid in college doesn’t need an introduction to, it’s education. We have been in the education morass for thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years. We have suffered the indignity of terrible teachers, boring classes, and mindless lessons.

Intro to Education, I’ve met you, and I’m not interested.

I would come to find that the way Saint Leo structured their education program was unusual for that time. Lots of people I taught with who became teachers in the 1990s, especially at large universities, spent their two years in education classes learning the theory of teaching, being taught what a teacher does and how they do it, by college professors. They taught a few lessons to other college students, but never in a real class with real kids, never in a real school with thirty little faces looking up at you. Often at other colleges, you do not get into a real classroom until the final semester of your senior year when you do your teaching internship.

This can be likened to teaching a musician how to play an instrument by explaining it to them. Imagine you’re the musician, and you never actually get to play the instrument. Then, after two years, you are expected to perform a solo recital. Good luck with that!

For many education majors, it is only in their senior year, four months before graduation, standing in front of a group kids teaching a lesson for the first time, that they realize, oh my God, this is not for me. Luckily, Saint Leo did not do this, probably because of the size of the school and the philosophy of the department. Every education class, from Intro up, required the student to go into the classroom and interact with kids. Even if it was just to observe, you were in the classroom watching real teaching occur.

Even with this much exposure to the real environment of secondary education, I still wasn’t completely convinced that teaching was for me.

My reasons were the same that many people give when they say they would never be a teacher: mediocre income, lack of position in the community or society, lack of importance. I believed that teaching was a job people did when they had no interest in making a larger impact on the world, and worse, it never gave them the opportunity to reach their fullest potential.

I believed all of this to be true, but that wasn’t the real reason I didn’t want to be a teacher. Mainly it was because the teachers I’d had from elementary through high school were unremarkable for the most part. I’m sure they tried hard, and in their way, they cared. But the vast majority of teachers were a parade of people for whom I was just another kid, just another student, just another desk filler. Most teachers seemed to come from the same school of thought: you teach by talking/lecturing, or you teach by giving kids a textbook to read and telling them to answer the questions at the end of the chapter. After some time — a few days, a week, two weeks — we would get a test, and then it would be time to move on to the next chapter. Lessons were didactic, teacher directed. It was hands-on if you consider holding a textbook, a pen, and a sheet of paper hands-on.

The teachers I had didn’t seem to care about their students. I don’t think this was a conscious decision; rather, this was simply what was done. My teachers wanted me to come in, sit down, shut up, do the work, and leave. At the end of the year, a teacher might know my name, my grade, and maybe remember that I was a good writer or did math well or memorized some scientific ideas or could do the right amount of sit-ups or whatever their curriculum demanded. But that was it. No idea of me. No idea of who the people in their classes were.

Teachers spend more time in any given week interacting with the kids than the kids spend with their parents. But the people who taught me didn’t even know if I had parents. They didn’t seem to care that I was lonely, or that a kid might have lost his mom, or that a girl was good at ballet, or that the kid in the corner was getting beaten by his dad on a regular basis.

This may sound unkind, but the main reason I didn’t want to be a teacher was because of how I was treated by my teachers, which taught me the unspoken message, “Don’t care about the people you spend every day with, don’t make a difference, don’t reach out, don’t transcend the course description or the state-mandated curriculum.”

Why would anyone want that for a career?

And then I entered the senior high school class I had been assigned to by my Intro to Education professor.

The teacher met me at the door, but not just me; she met each of her students. She smiled at them. She talked to them, not about the work they were doing in class but about sports, the weekend, life. And the kids smiled and were generally happy to see her. I entered the room, and the first thing I noticed was the desks were in a circle. In all my years as a student, I had never seen the desks of a classroom in anything but rows. When the class started, there were no books opened, no notes taken, no lecture given; instead, the students discussed an article the teacher had provided. The students argued. They disagreed. They spoke passionately for or against some political position. Students countered with historical facts relevant to the discussion. The teacher guided, coming back to the article, focusing the class but never telling students what to think or how to think. It was invigorating. I was supposed to be taking notes for an observation paper I was to write about what I saw. I completely forgot, taken up by the passion, the exchange, the ideas.

Not once during the class did the teacher ask the kids to take notes, and there was no bookwork; it was the students expressing their points of view and the teacher guiding the discussion, but it was all about them. The atmosphere was warm and open. From the start of class, there was this relaxed air, but as relaxed as things were, there was real, deep, thoughtful work going on. Instead of studying from the textbook, students were exploring those ideas as a group.

Wait.

School could be this?

A teacher who allows kids to think and to express their own ideas?

And the teacher cares about those kids?

Not just about their grades but about them? As people?

Wait, school could really be this?

Oh, okay — maybe this was just a special lesson, maybe for my benefit.

So I went back the next week, and of course the room was in rows. Sure, the teacher was at the door. And sure, she still seemed interested in them and ultimately in me, but I knew the truth would come out in the lesson. And just as I thought, it wasn’t a discussion like the previous week. It was a debate. The class had been divided into two groups. They had spent the week researching the topic. They had worked together as a team to prepare. Each kid had to speak at least three times. They argued, attacked, discussed, and questioned. What had been only a surface-level discussion the week before had become deep, well rounded, and more reasoned.

The hour flew by.

Afterward I sat and spoke with the teacher. She explained her idea of education and how you get to know your kids, and when you do, you get them to open up. The more open they are to you, the more engaged in your class they become. She explained how she felt that real education happens when you give students a background; this is where lecture and the textbook come in handy, but you move beyond that. You go deeper, and you use all kinds of techniques to make learning matter to them.

In other words, make the learning matter; make the kids matter.

I had seen teaching from a new perspective, and it was all about making kids matter. But it also included the things I loved: arguing, debating, ideas, history, politics, and law!

One week later, I changed my major to history and secondary education.

Because of my father, I was on the path to be the teacher I never planned on being at a college I never planned on going to.

Years later, I told my father how I shared this story with my students at the beginning of each new school year, the story of how I became a teacher, and the central part he played in setting the course of my life. As I did, I could see him cringe. He hated the story, and he confessed something to me: as much as I had wanted to be a lawyer and a politician, my father had wanted it just as much. He told me that he felt like I was not using my gifts to their fullest extent, and that it was not too late for me to give up being a teacher to go to law school and become a politician. I didn’t know how to react. How do you tell your father that his cringe-worthy belief is the thing that has brought you the greatest joy? Maybe I was wasting some skills (or not), though I defy a lawyer to juggle all the skills a teacher has to have, but it didn’t matter. I had found my calling. I would never be President or matter much in any way outside the extent of the four walls of my classroom. And that was okay. It was better than okay. It was exactly what I wanted!

So now that I knew the direction of my life, I had to figure out what that meant. What kind of teacher would I be? How would I get there?

I began my education classes. They were helpful in giving me a foundation, but they were like learning how to play a sport by having someone explain it to you instead of doing it yourself. We learned a lot of education theory, and much of it was incredibly helpful to understanding kids, but it wasn’t always practical. We spent very little time learning about how to create a classroom, but one part of the Intro to Education class stood out in this regard. The book described four basic types of classrooms, and though two of the four types are long lost to my memory, two stood out. I remember one vividly because it is what I believe a classroom should be, and it was what I wanted for my classroom.

The other was the authoritative teacher, which I dismissed as unfeasible and the opposite of what a classroom should be. In this paradigm, the teacher is the head of the class, the leader, judge, jury, and executioner of every aspect of the classroom. Rules are rigid and strictly enforced. A student’s job is to fit within the classroom structure that the teacher creates. Students have little freedom. Often the teacher follows a strict pedagogy of lectures, notes, and the use of a textbook.

The other kind of classroom is the democratic one. The teacher is the ultimate authority, but the students have choice; rules are agreed upon and often made by the students. Punishment is something that students agree on. The teacher is more of a mentor and coach, yes, a person who delivers information, but also who allows students to forge their own path. The only rigidity in this structure is the firm commitment to the idea that it will not be rigid. Students and teachers are almost on the same level.

As we covered these distinct types of classes, there was no question in my mind the kind of classroom I wanted. What appealed to me was the authoritative teacher, the knower of all things, the leader, the benevolent dictator, if I am being honest. I don’t think I had any real interest in being benevolent as much as being in charge. I was interested in control, in structure, and I fell back to what I had always known as a student. Ironically enough, in retrospect, this was the whole reason I never wanted to be a teacher in the first place, and went completely against how drawn I felt to the open classroom I had observed in my sophomore year of college, but at the time, I did not connect the two. I also knew that a “democratic” classroom was folly; it could not work. Students as equals? That’s laughable. Students making the rules? Impossible. Freedom, choice, teacher as mentor or coach or anything but authoritative teacher, that wasn’t for me. In my twenty-year-old mind, I could not conceive of such a class or how a class like this could work. I wanted a different kind of relationship with my students than what I had experienced in my school years, but I didn’t know how to make that possible.

The dirty little secret about the education of teachers in college is that very little of it has any value to a real classroom. The knowledge I found far more helpful was gained from the time I spent in actual classrooms. In the two years I was in the education program at Saint Leo, I observed or got to teach a preschool Montessori class, an elementary class, a middle school Social Science class, and two high school classes.