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!
WAS I REALLY THAT GUY?
SEPTEMBER 28, 2022
While my first two years at Bishop McNamara High School provided me with a wonderful introduction to the profession of teaching, it was my early years at Regis Jesuit High School during which I developed into the educator I would be early in my career.
I look back on my impressions of that guy now over the distance of decades and I am not sure that, the high school principal I am, I would want to hire that version of me for my own staff.
I am fully aware that that guy was a product of his time and that education has gone through significant philosophical shifts in the ensuing years. I am fully aware that I have gone through significant shifts in the ensuing years. I am equally fully aware that I was kind of a tool back then.
In my early years at Regis Jesuit, I prided myself on being a no-nonsense teacher, the kind of teacher who did not plan to smile until Christmas. I wanted to be a teacher that my students feared. My overriding goal in the classroom was control. I needed to have it and it needed to be total.
I remember the kinds of assignments I gave, the 50 question vocabulary tests, the quote tests wherein I would give a line or two of a book or play and expect the students to remember who said it, why they said it and why it was important, the lengthy reading assignments, the deadlines that were unreasonable, the zeroes I would readily write (yes write) in my gradebook.
I remember my ego, because my early years in teaching were all about my ego.
Perhaps the best/worst example of who I was back then was when a student would challenge me about something to which I did not have a good answer. This could have been about a point of fact, an interpretation of a passage, a mistake I had made grading an assignment. My answer back then would typically be something to the effect of: “Excuse me… how many letters do you have after your name? When you have a few, get back to me.”
Ugh.
I hope that I have come a long way. I sincerely hope that. I know at least this – and this is something I certainly did not think when I was starting out – I have a long way to go and a ton to learn. 30 years have taught me that.