Serendipity

At the end of every school year I find myself thinking back over not just the events that transpired in the last seven or eight months but the events that make up the sum total of my teaching career.  Students, co-workers, successes, and failures.  And among these assorted ramblings I am reminded of the reasons I got to the place where I am and why I am so absurdly happy doing what I do.  For you see when I graduated from E.C. Glass in the spring of 1994 I wanted desperately to get back but I kind of fundamentally knew, as the Moody Blues son goes, "you can never go home again".  But wish I did.

So something serendipitous happened exactly ten years ago that set me on a return path home.

I had just finished my first and what would become my only year teaching middle school under the principalship of Jay Sales.  I joke rather frequently with people that no amount of prescription medication has thus far helped me in blocking that year from my memory but truth is it wasn't that bad.  The middle school creature is a... different sort.  A friend of mine was fond of saying, "middle schoolers should just be put in deep freeze for three years and then thawed as 14 year olds."  I worked with a lot of great people at Sandusky Middle - Kenya Fowler, Calvin Buck, David "Moose" Pierce - and had some fantastic students.  Coming from a rather exclusive high school background I found myself often backtracking in my lessons to cover skills and details that I didn't realize middle schoolers hadn't mastered yet ("What do you mean the definition of a noun confuses you?").  But I survived and more importantly I think that year helped make me a better 9th grade teacher.

Thus, toward the end of that year Jay Sales called me in his office for an end-of-year chat.  He rather honestly asked me how my year had gone.  I often wondered if he picked up on my happy-yet-not-that-happy sense of being a high school teacher in middle school.  He was perceptive in that way, I think.  Because I suspected he already knew what my honest answer would be I decided to be honest in an out-loud way.  I told him that I was fairly content, that I was teaching English and worked with some good people, but I felt a bit like "a round peg in a square hole."  (Sidenote: as someone who has come to ABHOR cliches, I sure used a crap ton of them in my younger days.)  I don't remember much more about that conversation except that my Principal had the look of a man who was pleased I had told him the truth.  I left his office without expectation but also a little sadder for having articulated my frustration out loud.  It was now a real thing, hovering about me like the rings of Saturn.

But that man, for whatever reason and against whatever sense he had of keeping me as a teacher in his school, called up the Principal of Glass all on his own and said (I learned later) something to the effect of, "I have someone over here that needs to be over there.  What kind of English teacher openings do you have?"  And the ball rolled.

Perhaps that is just his nature: I've got someone here who needs something different, something else.  He's a good worker (now I'm just putting words in his mouth) but he's better suited for you than for me.  Perhaps he would have done it for anyone else; I'd believe that.  But the fact he did it for me and allowed me to in so many ways return home is an act for which I will ever be behold to him.

It is right and good to acknowledge the people in our lives that we owe something to and I have many.  From family to colleagues to even students.  A boat can't sail, after all, until the main lines to shore have been cast off.