(Almost) 20 Years in the Game

(Almost) 20 Years in the Game

This coming fall will mark 20 years since my first teaching assignment: 3rd form (11th grade) boys and 2nd form (10th grade) girls English Literature at Our Lady of Mount Carmel High School in Benque Viejo del Carmen, Belize.

It would be hard to overstate the impact this year had on me, as a person and specifically as a person who has spent most of his adult life teaching young people.

Like most young teachers, I was unprepared for the classroom. Unlike most young teachers, I had not received any formal teacher training. I hadn’t taken any education courses in college. I hadn’t shadowed any other teachers for certification or to get licensed in my subject area. I arrived in Benque a week before classes would begin. I received keys to the classroom I would be teaching in for the year. The course of study for the students–what I would be teaching–would be up to me.

My particular pedagogical situation was not unique. Mt. Carmel was a relatively new high school at this time–less than 15 years old, I believe. Of the 25 or 30 teachers on the staff, more than half were like me, brand new graduates from North American colleges and there only for that particular school year. The other half were Belizeans, mostly native Benqueños. The idea was for volunteers to help get the school going, and then for Belizeans to one day run the school completely on their own.

The year I taught at Mt. Carmel was a momentous transition period: a founding leader of the school, a long-time lay member of Society of Our Lady of the Holy Trinity (SOLT), the religious order that funded the school, was stepping down as principal to hand on the reins to a native Benqueño.

I had just graduated from the University of Dallas, a Catholic college that I would characterize as a form of a “great books school.” UD required all of its students to take a core curriculum of philosophy, theology, history, and literature courses, studying classics of Western Civ like Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Aquinas’ Summa, Plato’s Republic, etc. I have mixed feelings about this education, but it is hard to deny it was a great benefit to me in the situation I found myself in, in the fall of 2005.

I may have been uncertain and shaky about many things as a teacher, but one thing I did have confidence in was the power of good (old) books. I knew they knew more than I did. And that I could lean on them to make up for the many shortcomings I would surely show in my first year as a teacher.

Although I am not sure I was actually that humble(d) then; in truth, I believe I thought of myself as a kind of gift to the young people I was teaching. Annoying and certainly colonialist attitude, but the truth nonetheless.

The names and the faces that belong to them come to me now as I write, and in many cases, they come more quickly and easily to mind than students I taught only a year or two ago at my current school. Isn’t that something? And in the poems and essays I’ve written about these students I taught in my first year of teaching, I never seem to be able to say enough. The words don’t do them justice. It truly boggles my mind to think that now they are 37, 38, and 39 year old men and women.

But I am getting ahead of myself. In the week before classes began, I had not met a single student at Mt. Carmel. I just knew I had to plan the year. Or better, I had to plan the first part of the year. (I don’t think I’d really internalized the word “unit” yet; it wasn’t a word in vogue in my own schooling.) Anyway, I had to do some planning, and I knew I was an English teacher now, and so I mosied on over to the Mt. Carmel book closet.

I looked for books that I wanted to introduce to teenagers. There were in that book closet 30 or 40 copies of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a book that I had read and enjoyed, first as a kid, then as a teenager, and finally at the University of Dallas. After a very short bit of mulling, I decided that could be our first quarter text of study. I’d need some more copies, and so I sent an email out to the friends and donors who had helped pay for my flight to Belize. Would they mind sending copies of Huck Finn to Mt. Carmel? As I recall, these books came quickly, before we’d been in class for even a week.

In the years since, I’ve agonized over my first curricular choice: white teacher’s first assigned reading for his class of black and brown students, and it’s a novel with 200+ instances of the n-word? Really?

With what I know now about teaching and power and race, I would have certainly made a different choice. But I didn’t know what I know now, and I wasn’t the same person. And, really, who am I to beat myself up over this choice? I was teaching boys. I wanted a coming-of-age novel. The book closet didn’t have that much in the genre, so there I was. Anyway, more valuable to me than any 20-year old at the choice was the real-time feedback in 2005 of the 60+ teenage boys I’d assigned the book. (The girls I wouldn’t start teaching until November.) For them, the instances of the n-word weren’t the primary concern. Reading and understanding what was actually being communicated on the page were more central.

And this struggle to comprehend the reading was matched by what I saw in the writing I assigned them. Students struggled to compose sentences. Lots of unintentionally incomplete sentences. Run ons. Fragments. And verbs being conjugated in all manner of ways that weren’t consistent with the tense the student was going for. In the depth of my 0.001-years experience as an English teacher, I discerned grammar as a central issue to address.

I’d had an eighth grade English teacher, Mrs. Stanisha, who’d taught us grammar by having us diagram sentences. And she drilled us on memorizing the principal parts of verbs (present, present participle, past, and past participle), especially irregular ones. We’d have these quizzes where we’d copy out the four principal parts of a verb she’d call out, and then copy down all TWELVE conjugations of the verb–present, past, future, and all of the progressive and perfect variations.

I was taught in this way and so I taught the boys and girls of Benque in this way. I too called out irregular verbs. I too diagrammed. I too gave regular quizzes.

I’m not convinced this grammar obsession had a lot of pedagogical value. (And since that year I’ve read reams of studies, books, and articles that argue this kind of instruction does little to benefit young people’s reading and writing skills.) But it did have the benefit of establishing me as an authority for the students: clearly I knew something they didn’t know, and would teach them that thing, or at least repeatedly drill them on it.

In terms of “classroom management”: I’d received the usual advice from the veteran teachers at Mt. Carmel–don’t try to be their friend, be strict at first, only later relax discipline. And I worked to implement this philosophy myself. But the most effective way to get a class going–which I still use to this day–was simply starting a class period with silent reading. I could walk around the room and take attendance easily enough. Students would be quiet–or I’d shush them. They’d had enough schooling to be used to doing what they were told. And I had the authority to tell them what to do.

None of what I’m describing is teaching. In the formulation of Brother Gregory Mayers, some of it might qualify as conditioning (routines) and perhaps other parts of it training (the drilling on verbs), but not necessarily leading to growth of the student in wisdom. Even now, after 20 years in the game, I find myself often toggling between mere training and condition, and wondering where wisdom lives, or hides, in my practice as a teacher. Mind you, this is not some show of humility. I’m trying to be as honest as I possibly can with what I’ve done in my career. And I imagine if you’re a classroom teacher reading this account and honest with yourself, you might come to similar conclusions.

And yet in spite of the basic boring-ass pedagogy I practiced (and often still practice), I got to meet and know these young people. In person–Atanacio’s tattooed arms curling up behind his head as he leaned back in his chair, skeptically assessing my choice of reading material; Telesha whooping out a cry of appreciation at seeing Denzell Washington’s beaming visage bestride a horse appearing on screen as we prepared to create our own skits on scenes from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing; Andy sauntering in, perpetually three minutes late all year long, grinning mischievously, always, in my mind, holding the tardy slip I’ve handed him, as if to say, “what am I supposed to do with this?”

These little memories I cherish, but I also got to meet these student-writers on the page. And thanks to a quirk of missionary zeal, that encounter was a pretty deep one, too.

I was a regular mass-goer at the village church, even on weekdays. A pious youth. And so it wasn’t a big surprise when one of the priests at this church, who also helped run Mt. Carmel School, invited me to participate in a months-long prayer group (we met once a week during Lent, I think) where we considered the ways God was acting in our lives. The five or six teachers in the prayer group were encouraged to look back over different memories and stories from our past that in some way revealed God’s “Plan of Life” for us. This was a core practice for Society of Our Lady of the Holy Trinity (SOLT), the new-ish Catholic religious order that ran Mt. Carmel. The priest noted it could be helpful to write about these God’s “Plan of Life” moments with honesty and care.

At the time, I had written a good bit of poetry of fiction but little to nothing of personal essay writing. (And hadn’t journaled since I was 10 or 11 years old.) Something clicked for me with this prompt: I learned some new things about myself, I was moved to connect and in some cases reconcile with folks from my past, and I honestly did have in the writing process a deeper sense of God’s presence permeating my own story, and the stories of those around me. All in all, a good experience.

As there was still a month or so left in the school year, and since we were (finally) wrapping up one of my final core class texts, Dante’s Inferno, I thought: why not have students try this writing prompt themselves? Write into a memory, or memories of God’s “Plan of Life” for them?

And so I shared some of the stories that had bubbled up for me, and then gave them space and time in class to write some of their own. It’s 20 years ago now, and I have no files of my teaching work from that time, but I’m pretty sure I introduced the assignment with the framework I’d been given from that SOLT priest. The intensity of religious piety that I had (and shared with others in the prayer group) was most emphatically not shared by my students, so for the classes, the assignment boiled down to: “tell an important story (or stories) from your life.”

The experience of reading these 90+ personal essays made me see, and maybe for the first time, the awesome gift that teaching can be.

These kids wrote about learning to ride a bicycle. About beloved family members dying. About falling in love. Falling out of love. They wrote about scars–ones on their skin, and ones on their hearts and souls–and the adventures and misadventures that had made the imprints. I knew it was a deep and holy privilege to read these stories. As most newbies to deep and holy things, I didn’t know what to do to respond to that privilege. I remember writing encouraging and wondering things in the margins of the pages they’d written me (all handwritten, there wasn't much in the way of tech in that village in ‘05). I didn’t mark for grammar.

I don’t remember what I did for grading. The word “rubric” wasn’t something that meant very much to me, if anything. I know that the students wrote the stories, that I read them and wrote encouraging things, and that I gave them back shortly after they’d turned them in. And then, just a few breathtakingly short weeks later, I was back at my parents’ house in a suburb of Saint Paul, Minnesota, wondering what I was going to do with the rest of my life.

I had actually been invited to teach another year of English at Mt. Carmel, but the offer was still for me to do this work as an unpaid volunteer. At 23 going on 24 years old, there were still many things I didn’t know about adulthood, but one thing that I did know was that unless I was going to commit to life in this religious order, or to a new life in Belize, I needed to get a job. And that’s what I did.

But I’d caught the teaching bug in Benque, as a lot of early 20-somethings have caught the same bug through work in similar (but usually much less religiously oriented) programs that exist.

For instance, since 1989, Teach for America, has sent idealistic young college grads to high-need schools across the country. I’ve read powerful and also sobering narratives by and about the experiences of these teachers and the students they work with. And in the Catholic school that I have worked in through most of my career, the ACE program (run out of Notre Dame) and the Ignatian Volunteer Corps (Jesuits) have started the careers of many of my colleagues. As I have watched these young people come into their own as educators, I marvel at the level of institutional structure present: curricula, coaches, mentor check-ins, classes, and certifications. It’s impressive, and a big help. (And even with some of these structures, many TFA and ACE teachers express frustration at the lack of support and structure.)

But, to be honest, or TBH as my students would say, I’m pretty sure I would have hated all that structure. Here are the keys to your classroom, you have a week, they told me in 2005. The spartanness of that calling was what I needed to get my ass in gear.

While there may be an argument embedded in this story–don’t be like me, maybe?--I’m sure it’s not as straightforward as you or I think it is. It is true that you could strip good literature teaching down to loving relationships with your students. To reading good books. To talking to your students (and really listening to them) and having them talk to one another, and really listening to each other. But that leaves out so much craft that years of experience (and study) will teach you.

And craft and competence are vitally important to good teaching, too. I don’t want to underrate those things. How you manage your responsibilities–planning units and year plans, organizing your physical space, communicating with parents, keeping good records–that all matters. But this is not an essay about those important elements of craft and competence. Because, as important as those elements have been for me to learn, they have not been as essential as the “stripping down” experience in Belize was: not knowing what I should do and not having a support system to turn to forced me to figure out what teaching meant to me, and how (and whether) I wanted to do it.

And those essential questions remain for me, all these years later. What does teaching mean to me? How do I want to do it? Do I want to (still) do it?

There’s a lot of conversation now (and has been for most of my lifetime) around the idea of the “effectiveness” of teachers in classrooms. This conversation, and the metrics that inform it, have their place. But when you are talking about a job like teaching, you also have to take into account whether teachers see value and purpose–and continue to see value and purpose–in what they are doing. K-12 teachers are consistently named as the highest or one of the highest ‘burnt out’ professions in the United States. And every year, a large number of us leave the classroom, never to return.

Programs like Teach For America tout that they have ¼ of teachers stay in the classroom after they finish their 2 year assignments. Another quarter work in education-affiliated jobs–administrative, public policy, think tanks, etc. But that still leaves the other half of idealistic young people who did not continue to teach after that initial 2-year experiment.

I tend to vote for, connect with, and support politically progressive causes. At the same time, I’m skeptical of the belief that we are as a species progressing or “evolving”--this seems to me belied by many facts on the ground. Certainly in the field of education, and in English education particularly, this idea of ‘progression’ in knowledge and wisdom is laughable.

That first teaching assignment in Benque 20 years ago, with no teacher training and little to no oversight and coaching, the students and I read and discussed Huckleberry Finn, Dante’s Inferno, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. As well as all of the books of Genesis, 1st and 2nd Samuel, and the Gospel of Mark. (I told you I was a pious youth.)

Granted, I had just graduated from a ‘great books’ college as I mentioned, so an emphasis on the primacy of particular texts was part of my make-up, so to speak.

But conversation with many people of my era–educators and non-educators alike–confirm the general principle that in English class you read lots of books, and discussed them in class. 20 years later, in spite of my best efforts, that is often not the case. This past year, for instance, I struggled to lead us in the reading of two whole-class texts, Zora Neale Hurston’s short novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and August Wilson’s Fences.

There are lots of reasons for this, many of which I’ve already outlined on this Substack–among them an overly prescribed and standardized system of education, and the dominance of the Common Core and its almost universal adoption in schools. I don’t say this to be ‘doom and gloom.’ I only want to point out that it’s not at all clear we are getting ‘better’ as English teachers or progressing, in any reasonable sense of the word. To adapt language from a few of our own optimistic presidential administrations from the past few decades, we have not “raced to the top” of any reading mountains. And we certainly have “left” more than a few “children behind.”

Literature, if it is a “school” at all (and I’m skeptical of that phrasing) is a schooling in wisdom. In the art of living. That schooling takes time. Patience. Discussion. A personal relationship with a guide. Maybe that guide is a classroom teacher, maybe a sibling or friend. Maybe a wise elder in the community. Whoever the guide is, that person has themselves experienced and taken the lessons from the literature they are sharing, and can model it for the people around them.

I’m painfully aware that the words I’ve chosen in the paragraph above–wisdom, patience, guide, elder, personal relationship–are very often not the language of those with power in our schools, nor of those with power over our schools. I know, too, that an essay, a collection of essays like this which my Substack represents, is easily dismissable by those in power. Wisdom will never be able to be quantified on a standardized test, and neither will a personal relationship. And yet, you know wisdom when you see (and hear) it. And you can tell when a teacher has trust with a student. A story’s power is not quantifiable as a test score is. And yet you know when you are moved–the tears on your face, the laughter rollicking your gut.

My year in Belize was an initiation into story, and a first stumble onto the steps of a wisdom path. And the faces and voices of those students I was privileged to teach in that first year, and in the years since, have come back to my mind’s eye and ear in the years that have followed, to encourage, to challenge, and to provoke me, when I have faced difficult moments in the years since.

Let me conclude with a post-script, another spot on my teacher / life timeline.

In 2017, I’d been away from the classroom for a year. Cristina and I, after getting married, had moved to Chicago, where she had a lot more connections to further her musical career. At first, I’d considered getting a teaching job–even applied for and interviewed for some of those positions–but ultimately decided I needed some time away from the intensity of the classroom in this new season of my personal life.

I wasn’t totally out of education altogether, though. I had a job as a communications manager at a graduate school of theology, Pope Leo’s alma mater as it happens, Catholic Theological Union. It was doing this particular work, living this life of our first year of marriage in Chicago, that I heard the terrible news from my father-in-law that two Cristo Rey students who I’d taught had been killed in a car accident by a drunk driver.

I’d taught both Diana and Chris when they were 9th graders, and could see their 9th grade selves immediately and clearly in my mind’s eye when I heard the news. Chris was a popular and well-loved student-athlete. (He was a key founding member of the on-again, off-again school baseball team.) He was smart and active in class discussions, though not always a fan of doing his homework. Diana was tenacious. An advocate, who if she saw another student being treated poorly in the hallway or class, wouldn’t wait to tell a teacher or administrator. She’d stand up for the bullied kid herself, with no fear.

As part of their end-of-year 9th grade English project, I used to make students memorize a piece of writing and recite it in front of the class. Usually, these pieces were poems, but sometimes they were also scripture passages or speeches. Diana chose MLK’s “I Have a Dream Speech.” Did it word for word, with power, with hunger for justice. I still remember that moment. My awe before her.

So, aside from the grief and the anger at these two young people’s lives being cut short in this way, as I remembered Chris and Diana, as I considered the privilege of teaching them for that year in their 9th grade, I also felt a challenge. The return of a call.

Creating marketing campaigns, managing social media, helping launch a website: these were important and valuable things to do. And I was perfectly adequate and (I hope) reasonably competent in accomplishing these bread-and-butter marketing / communications tasks. And I knew that if I kept up with them, I would get better.

But I also knew that I had a knack for teaching. For connecting with young people. For building relationships. For calling out gifts and talents of expression in young people that they sometimes didn’t even know they had. Life is short, I remember thinking in the wake of this personal and communal tragedy. What business do I have not making the absolute most of my own?

To simplify a season of life that was more complex: after passing through and processing this grief, I began later that year searching in earnest for a teaching position. First, in Chicago, where Cristina and I lived. But then, as I reached out to my old employer, Cristo Rey in Minneapolis for references, I was offered my old job back (though now teaching 11th and 12th graders).

So here I am today, finishing up another year of teaching, my 14th at Cristo Rey. At the heart of why I’ve kept at it, and returned to it after walking away, is because of the young people I’ve been privileged to work with.

There are pictures of both Diana and Chris on the bookshelf near my work desk. I look at them often. When I do, I remember not to waste my life.

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Notes:

-As I was composing this essay, I was reading This Is Not A Test, a brilliant memoir-in-essay form by Jose Luis VIlson that shows how teachers can speak up on behalf of their student both through thoughtfully crafted lessons in the classroom and also through public witness as writers. It was originally published in 2014, but has lost none of its relevance in 2025.

-The poem I recited at the top of this essay, “I Don’t Want To Write a Poem for My Dead Students” is dedicated to the memory of Chris and Diana. I hope it honors them, as I hope my own teaching honors their memory. It was first published in NCTE’s English Journal, and then in the poetry collection, Knucklehead.

-What about you, reader? How would you characterize your own “first year in the game”? I’m especially interested in the teachers on this Substack, but I think there’s wisdom to be gained from all of these work / life ‘origin stories.’ Please do share.