An open letter to my students…all of them…

I’m sitting at my desk in room 600 at East Lansing High School, having packed up the things I want to take home.  From my students and colleagues at Westland John Glenn where I did my student teaching, to those students and colleagues I’m leaving behind at East Lansing, I would like to thank you for the ride.  I sat down last night and started recalling students at the places I taught who helped me (for better or worse) become the teacher I was by the end.  The range of schools at which I taught and coached is certainly wider than I ever imagined it would be when this all started.

At John Glenn I was placed with social studies teacher John Retzer (who is coincidentally retiring this year too.)  John threw me into the fire on day one it seems and really forced me to put behind all the theories of teaching just long enough to figure out how to actually teach.  John Glenn was a very diverse, urban school with classrooms so overcrowded I had to lay out masking tape on the shelves along the windows to create enough seats for my 40+ students.  It’s the school where I developed the “Seven Heads on the Desks Rule”.  Once the seventh student fell asleep, they all had to wake up.  It made for some fascinating entertainment watching the kids count and trying to time their descent into slumber so as not to be the seventh. 

My first teaching job was at Owosso High School, where I thought I would teach and coach for 20 years.  

This was the first time I got my name in the paper as a teacher. I was teaching government in my second year, and I had students attend school board and city council meetings. I could tell stories about Joe, Megan, and Kyle, but a student named Marlette was the one who taught me the most. She came back from a city council meeting and asked why the meetings started with a Christian prayer.  I simply said “I don’t know, why don’t you go ask them.”   So she did.  Her questions forced the city council to respect the First Amendment, and at least for a time, they stopped opening meetings with prayer.  A reporter showed up to get my take and pretty much assumed I would be embarrassed that one of my students caused such a ruckus in town.  Reporters should do a little research first, eh?

My 20 year Owosso plan was interrupted by this crazy little thing called love.  After my first year, Lisa and I got married and I started looking for work up north where she lived.  It took a year, but a job opened at Gaylord.  That was a fortuitous move for me since Owosso laid off a pile of teachers the next year due to declining enrollment.  At Gaylord I met so many great students.  I’m sure Kayti, Heather, John, Nick, and many more deserve some mention here, but it was Austin who taught me the most about the challenges of my job.  On January 21, 2009, I played President Obama’s inauguration address in my classes.  There are moments in that speech that can still give me chills.  (I guess I could go on some rant here how far we fell as a country in just 8 years as I reflect on the January 20, 2017 debacle, but that’s for a different time.)  After the speech, I had President Obama’s face frozen on the big screen as we paused to talk about the speech.  Austin raised his hand and said “I don’t like him.”  I asked “Oh?  Why’s that?”  Austin answered frankly “Because he’s black.”  The class lost it, and I stopped them.  In my few short years of teaching I already had come to realize (with apologies to Harry Bosch) that either everyone’s opinions mattered or none of them did.  So I pressed him.  He spewed the typical racist blather about black people being stupid and lazy, blah blah blah.  I pointed up at the screen and exclaimed “But he was elected President!  How can that be lazy and stupid?”  He quickly retorted “That’s the white half that did that.”  For a long time after I left Gaylord Austin and I kept in touch on social media, and I never stopped hoping that I could somehow reach him.  

The late 2000’s was not a great time to be a teacher in Michigan and Gaylord laid off another pile of teachers after my second year.  It was a devastating blow to me as I was coaching varsity baseball and running a pretty good Model UN team.  I applied for every job I could within 50 miles of Petoskey to no avail.  I finally got an interview at an alternative charter school in Boyne Falls.  They were willing to pay me $16,000 a year with no benefits.  Hard to imagine why they were having trouble filling the job, eh?  I turned it down, but I guess I made enough of an impression on the principal that she recommended me to the ISD for a job at a public alternative school in Bellaire.  I got that job with a real salary and benefits and drove an hour each way to school.  The students at Midtown High School were the kids the system had largely left behind.  Pregnant and teen moms, boys who had spent time in jail or in juvenile detention. I was the only staff member in the entire building and I cooked breakfast for them everyday.  I had three students who lived in an abandoned trailer on state land who made it to school almost every day.  Some of their classes were taken online in a relatively early version of the abomination we call online “learning”.  The rest I taught face to face.  I designed several electives to help get them the credits to graduate.  It was a painful, frustrating experience with very little success if we define success as actually getting kids to graduate.  My boss had to go to great lengths to remind me that success meant different things to different people.  I was never satisfied with that answer, but I knew he was right.  When Sabrina became my first graduate an enormous load was lifted.  After three years the ISD shut the school down because the one constant about kids who have been left behind once was that they were going to be left behind again.  

As with the last time, that only lasted the summer as the very same woman who had recommended me for the ISD job was now the assistant principal at Boyne City High School.  They hired me to work half days for the first year and that turned into full time the following year.  At the time of my hiring I was writing a political column in the Petoskey News Review.  I was the anointed liberal voice of the north by the paper who gave a column to several conservatives each week as well.  In my interview at Boyne City I told the superintendent and the principal that I was writing this column and if that was going to be a problem for them then she shouldn’t hire me because I was not going to give up the column.  But the superintendent, Peter Moss, was a stand-up guy with great vision, and he had no problem with teachers using their First Amendment privileges.  It’s too bad that his replacement didn’t have that same vision, backbone, and respect that Peter had.  The new superintendent was a piece of work.  At all-district staff meetings the teachers in the audience kept a scorecard of all the spelling and grammar errors on his slides.  I’m not sure what motivated the board of education to hire a guy from downstate with a pretty sketchy record, but they did.  When he taught high school at Dexter, he was removed from the classroom and made a hall monitor.  As a football coach his incompetence was unparalleled in school history being outscored by over 150 points in a 9 game schedule.  But hired he was and proved quite quickly that he was no Peter Moss.  A dude from Charlevoix (who is now indicted for trying to overturn the 2020 election) starting complaining about my anti-trump stands.  I had rightfully and accurately called trump’s election the worst day in American history and that riled up the magahats.  So the superintendent without the backbone started hassling me about my social media.  A real leader would have stood by his staff against reactionary political threats. But he was not a real leader.  Ultimately he fired me from my baseball coaching job for allegedly tweeting during school time.   When I pointed out to him that he had his phone set to Pacific time and that I actually had not done what he was accusing me of, he refused to acknowledge his error.  As I said, he was a piece of work.  Through all of that, the bulk of my students were very supportive.  Anna, Elizabeth,Carly, Auriana, Elise, Grace, Maddie, and many more appreciated what I was bringing to the table.  Even students who disagreed with me politically like Andrew and Nick were willing to engage in the discussions.  So many parents in the district had, for a reason still unknown to me, joined the trump cult.  Even though they were willing to send their kids to China with me, they spent a lot of time harassing me outside of school.  No one will ever question the unbridled hypocrisy of a trumper.  It was the students, of course, who kept me sane and working.  I think it mattered to some of them that, despite all the harassment, I didn’t stop my writing and I didn’t bail on them. 

Until I did.  Lisa had retired from teaching in 2018, and I was going to do the same in 2019.  In December of that year we moved downstate, and I was going to commute on weekends to the new house while finishing up the year.  An odd thing happened when I was downstate over Christmas.  I opened a jobsite wondering if there was a teaching job that might give me the opportunity to extend my teaching career for a year or two. Coincidentally, East Lansing had a teacher leave at the semester and they had to find someone to cover 5 AP classes immediately.  Turns out that I was their guy.  Turns out it was the best career move I ever made.  I was completely revitalized at the prospect of not having to defend myself in grocery stores and restaurants from people with red hats who somehow came to believe I cared even a little bit about their opinions of me.  I could actually go into town and not have to avoid people.  More importantly, East Lansing is a very diverse community.  Here, LGTBQ+ students didn’t have to hide their sexuality as their colleagues up north had to do.  In Boyne City, those kids were harassed, shoved on the stairwells, surrounded at football games and threatened.  There were only a few people of color up north, and if there were any Muslims, they sure as heck weren’t broadcasting THAT.  At East Lansing, students could openly embrace who they were and that made all the difference.  It turns out that living in fear and  ignorance of “the other” wasn’t the only way to do things.  I didn’t retire in 2019 or 2020 or 2021…  My career and my life had been profoundly revitalized.  I’m only retiring in 2024 because of some back issues that are going to require surgery which will create significant missed time in the fall of 2024.  If I tried to make a list of the students with whom I have developed a great relationship and who have challenged me, rewarded me, and inspired me, I would end up leaving 20+ folks out inadvertently.  But I have to try. Zoe, Jessica, Grace, Amelia, Mona, Alden, Will, Edith, Hugh, Stella, Aaliyah, Maddy, Marie Adele, Katie, Ben, Liam, Sophie, Toby, Belle, Nyx, Shahin, Alex, Guyhun, Dorijan, Anna, and many, many, many more pushed me, amused me, and provided me with several more wonderful years than I ever thought I was going to get.  

Ok…well that’s over 2000 words and I haven’t even gotten around to what I wanted to say.  

During the last class of my career, a student asked me something about what I had gotten out of teaching.  That seemed like a reasonable question to ask someone on their last day, but I found myself totally unprepared to answer.  I choked back a few tears as I stood before 31 students who wanted a real answer. 

Eventually I got around to saying something that approximated this.  “I won’t know what I got out of it until I know what YOU got out of it.  Will you put to use the critical thinking skills, the willingness to engage, and the courage to hold your ground?  If so, I would have gotten out of it the only thing a teacher can ever really hope for…to know I made a difference.”

Or maybe I should have just said this. “It was the money, kids.  I did it all for the money.”