With the close of last school year, I completed my 30th campaign in education. Each of those years has been filled with joy and sorrow, challenges and successes, ups and downs and a ton of stories worth sharing. My (True) Life in Education Thus Far will detail 30 or so of those stories. I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed living (most) of them!
HEADING HOME
SEPTEMBER 7, 2022
My time at Bishop McNamara High School is very special to me. I know that much of who I am as an educator was shaped in those early years – those first years – at McNamara. I was lucky to work with wonderful people, to serve under amazing mentors and to have students who were happy and motivated. Though I often felt overwhelmed, though every day was not perfect, though there are things I look back on and know I would change if I could go back and do them again, I loved those two years. They made me who I am three decades later.
The call to leave the Washington, DC area and to move back home to Denver was very strong, strong enough to pull me away from a comfortable position and one that was bringing me great joy.
Wanting to start a family, however, not wanting to have children in DC where the crime rate in the mid 1990s was extremely high and wanting to be close to my parents when kids came along were persuasive data points in my wife and I making the decision to move to Colorado. This was a decision aided by the fact that there was an English teaching opening at my alma mater, Regis Jesuit High School, and that my parents had a family friend (my former Geometry teacher) who was an assistant principal at the time who let them know I might have a good shot.
I flew home for the interview which I had been told would be with the principal, a man who was not at the school when I had graduated six years earlier. In those intervening years, the school itself had moved to a new campus in the south Denver suburbs and I actually got lost on the way to my appointment. No google maps in 1994! I arrived on time, however, and ended up interviewing with my old yearbook moderator and one of the nicest men I have ever known who was the English Department Chair and a new assistant principal who happened to be my former Algebra I teacher. I learned the next fall that the principal was off campus dealing with the terrible situation of a student falling from a cliff during a field trip to Red Rocks Amphitheater (that knowledge should have dissuaded me from ever wanting to be a principal!). The student was not seriously injured.
A few days after the interview, I was offered the job, was all too happy to accept it and my wife and I began plans to move home.
I would remain at Regis Jesuit for the next 20 years.
