Teachers, Teaching, Teacher Educators, Teaching Education: A Case for Class-Based and Classroom-Based Transitions

My Dad And School

My father, who passed in 2018, was the most sincerely curious individual I’ve ever known. Curious in the sense that he was unique and quirky and playful, and curious from the perspective that he wanted to learn about everyone and everything. He was a talented artist, and a gifted writer, and he was intrigued by every idea and individual. He was a student of the world, though he’d been removed from his own high school at 17 for disciplinary reasons. He dabbled in college multiple times, typically in abbreviated flares, including one final cycle supported by me and my siblings for art school in his 60s, but he never made it past earning a handful of credits. The financial needs of his family always won over his full time and attention, when he was a son and was called upon to assist his financially distressed clan with the small family grocery store, and later when he was a husband and father to me and my four siblings and the primary breadwinner for our fringe-poverty household.

He was also the most natural teacher: he was just that engaging and intelligent and a passionate listener. While he never served in a professional educator role, he would have been an extraordinary pedagogue in a classroom context. It’s because of him, and the student and teacher he could have been, that I have spent my own life teaching. First to high school “dropouts” and “pushouts” in my early 20s as an undergraduate at an elite private university (the University of Notre Dame), later as a backdoor-licensed teacher to adolescents living in inner city Chicago public housing and then at a public alternative school outside Seattle, and for more than two decades as an assistant, associate, and full professor of education to future high school and middle school teachers in Cleveland, Ohio and northern Virginia.