My first contact with Ben was when one of the History Department’s adjunct professors came to me with a potential problem.  This adjunct had a long teaching career in one of the area schools and that semester in the fall of 2007 he was teaching the Capstone course for the department.  He asked about the policy of the department and the university concerning students leaving courses early, before graduation, to take a job. One of his students, Ben, was offered a job just outside of Charleston, South Carolina and the job required Ben to start immediately, just after Thanksgiving.  Ben had already been awarded the History Department’s Most Outstanding Social Studies Major Award and given his background and experience and the fact that the semester had just a few weeks left to go, the word was given that Ben could take the job and leave before graduation, as long as he finished up the work he owed for the courses he was taking that semester.

In January of 2008 I visited Ben’s school, St. John’s High School.  I had no clue that within a month Ben would resign from his job and move back to Michigan.  The morning of my visit Ben met me at the main office and escorted me to his classroom on the second floor.  Barely had my day started with Ben when we heard a commotion in the hallway a few doors down. A ‘girl fight’ erupted and Ben went out to see what he could do to settle matters down. I walked out in the hall but stayed away from the crowd of students.  The fight sounded nasty.  Ben was able to break things up and he was back in a few minutes, but with a hand that was bleeding slightly from fending off a student and coming in contact with a locker.

The day before my visit to Ben’s school I had visited a middle school in Summerville, not that many miles away and after telling the administrators I would be in St. John’s the next day they said I would see “the other side of the spectrum” (Ben T, f.n., p.1, 2008). Summerville had a broad range of housing, from million-dollar homes to more modest housing. The school population was predominantly white. St. John’s was 90% African-American, with some Latino and Latina and a few Caucasian students. Ben told me that he was working with the fourth principal for the school year who was starting next week. This new principal was 28 years old with no principal’s experience.  Ben’s mentor was a volunteer mentor and she told me during the day that the new principal was “all about politics,” implying that the new person was not deserving of the job and not able to meet the challenges this school provided.  Both Ben and his mentor related that the rich kids went to private or charter schools in the area and did not attend the public schools.  This school was a different world from West Ottawa and Hudsonville, where Ben did his teacher-assisting and student teaching. My first encounter with West Ottawa Schools happened in my first semester at Grand Valley. I had a student placed with a teacher at Harbor Lights Middle School. When I entered the main foyer there were at least 25 students practicing their violins. No school where I had previously taught, and few I visited while teaching at Grand Valley had families with the resources to provide violins for their children. Hudsonville had a similar social and economic demographic, versus the large number of “free and reduced lunch” students who attend Grand Rapids Public Schools. (Ben, f.n., p.1, 2008).

Ben’s school day was arranged in an A/B block schedule, with 90-minute class periods, similar to the arrangement under which I taught for my last few years in Kansas.  The schedule would be “A” block classes on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays one week, with “B” block on Tuesdays and Thursdays and then the blocks would rotate the next week with “B” classes on the Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule.

Ben’s classroom was covered with posters of all types.  Some of these posters consisted of student artwork and during the day Ben told the students that they would soon have the opportunity to create new ones (Ben, f.n., p.3, 2008). Ben said he had some very good artists and several were good singers.  He explained that he used some of his classroom budget to buy his students “Fast Food Nation”^[1] as a way to engage his classes in reading, talk about culture and find a topic relevant to the students’ lives.  He said the students did engage in the book, in part because the book was theirs to keep.  He made it sound that it was unusual for the students to have something from school to keep as their own.  Ben also said that the students at St. John’s were willing to learn if their teachers cared. Because Ben cared about his students they came to his classroom to hang out between classes.  I noticed a list of eight names on Ben’s board under the title “missed exam”.  Ben told me that those eight students had been suspended from school and he lost one student a day due to suspension from his classes, but he was not necessarily responsible for the suspension.  Ben seemed to have decent resources for his classroom, but he admitted that administration and teacher support, except for the school’s curriculum person and his mentor, had been spotty or poor. All of this conversation happened during Ben’s first period preparation.

Ben’s second period class was a 9th grade World History class. He started the class with a journal question about the Presidential primary.  Amongst the posters on his classroom wall were posters for Obama, Clinton and Edwards.  The far corner of the class was a little chatty, but the class settled down to do their journal writing.  A female student near me stated that if Hillary Clinton was elected, she would be assassinated like Bhutto had been in Pakistan. I heard similar conversations in Michigan schools about Obama in the fall of that year (Ben T., f.n., p.2, 2008). Once the journaling assignment, a warm up activity, was completed, Ben started the discussion about the upcoming Presidential primaries.  He brought up Middle Eastern countries and how male-dominated societies might not respect a female president.  Ben was a former Marine who had served time in the Middle East and Africa so he could speak from experience.  It was obvious during the class discussion that Ben worked as many angles as he could to get some type of relationship going with his students.  Several students got up and moved around the room during the discussion but did not seem to cause any disruption and Ben did not seem concerned with this movement.  It became obvious in the discussion of the students’ journal writings that they would have elected Ben president.  A student stated that Hillary had more experience in her background for running the country because of her experience as a senator and her time as First Lady, whereas Obama had only two years in the Senate.  It was remarked that Edwards had a long legislative career.  A male student had a good comment that Ben directed toward the female students in the class. It was about a newspaper article that commented on African-American women controlling the African-American vote and the fact that more women would show up to vote in the primary than African-American men would (Ben T., f.n., p.2, 2008).

At this point in the period the activity shifted from the discussion on journaling to the rest of the agenda for the day which was posted on the board. Ben had planned for 6 different activities: 1.) journaling, 2.) discussion on the candidates, 3.) reading (just three pages), 4.) answering seven questions on the reading, 5.) a worksheet entitled “Trade Across North Africa” and starting work on an “Early African Civilizations” vocabulary worksheet. Twelve of the eighteen students engaged in answering the questions in the textbook. The other six students needed some prodding by Ben in order to get started on their work. The text was published by Glencoe and the National Geographic Society. The three-page assignment was informative but not necessarily interesting for these students. Ben moved around the room to assist the students reading and to help keep them on task. As he moved by me, he said the students were “wound up” from the fight this morning. Based on what had happened in the hallway, the suspension information about the eight students who missed the exam and the average daily rate of suspension I did not have a good idea at this point of what constituted an “average day” for Ben (Ben T., f.n., p.2, 2008).

Ben did a good job working the room keeping the students on task.  There was a general chatter but the students seated around me were committing answers to paper.  All of the students willingly accepted Ben’s help.  It became obvious during the day that Ben had walked into a “worst case” scenario.  It was a mid-year job opening.  The teacher in Ben’s classroom had left early in the school year. The students had two long-term substitute teachers, there had been three, now four, changes in the principals and there were teachers insulated in their classrooms.  Had anything in Ben’s preparation in college prepared him for this “perfect storm?”  Even though several of the members of this study commented positively about the fact that GVSU places their students in two different schools, in different grade levels, Ben’s two placements in Michigan were in no way similar to what he encountered at St. John’s.  Ben did mention that his students’ test scores increased before he started teaching there, but in his opinion, the students did not have much positive teaching before his arrival.  He was advised not to teach content right off the bat until he had time to get to know his students through several activities.  As a result, he was behind where the state standards said he should be by this time of the year.

At this point in the class Ben tried to get a sleeping student to wake up and get to work.  He unsuccessfully tried to rouse her several times.  He told me that 90% of the students at the school were free or reduced-price lunch students.  The area was high poverty, with many broken homes.  There was not much military involvement by the families in the area versus the school district I visited in Texas where part of the stress on students existed because of parental overseas postings.  The combination of the local South Carolina accent and the slang the students used made it almost impossible for me to understand what the students were saying many times and I wondered how Ben acclimated to the change in speech and language from his home area in West Michigan.  These kids did have street smarts.  Ben said that they knew how to defeat the school’s web blocking software by using a proxy (Ben, f.n., p.3, 2008).  Two girls were taking photos of the class with a camera during most of the class period.  They were a distraction to the rest of the class, but Ben did not stop their photographic endeavors.  Ben told me towards the end of the class that the teachers post each class average on the board in order to create a little pride and spirit of competition between their classes and Ben said that seemed to motivate the students.

Ben’s next class was U.S. History.  The journal question to start the class was, “What if the North had surrendered Ft. Sumter?”  Ben had taken his class to the fort yesterday.  Several retired teachers were at Sumter and commented on how well-behaved Ben’s students were so Ben started the class today by complimenting the students’ behavior at the fort yesterday.  Ben explained to me that the ninth grade had a reputation and that the students had been talking about making the new principal prove himself when he arrived.  The students would show him “who was boss.” (Ben, f.n., p.4, 2008)  Like the previous class Ben started off the class with a short discussion on the Presidential primaries.  He asked some good questions and got some good feedback from the students.  He then set up the atmosphere for a Civil War pre-test.  There would be no stress and he just wanted to know what they already knew and what they never knew.  As a result, the class was quiet and engaged when they started to take the test.

After the test was over the class immediately started work on a worksheet based on a Walt Whitman reading, “Come up from the fields, Father”.  The students were quiet and engaged in reading and answering questions and Ben did not have to work as hard to keep the students engaged in the activity as he did the previous class period.  Despite the differences in schools and the school population this activity was very similar to one I had witnessed at the middle school in Summerville the previous day.  Ben held the students’ attention as he explained how Whitman helped establish the device of creating multiple meanings of words within literature and, specifically how the word “bad” might have multiple meanings.  In the class discussion Ben established the relevancy of a letter home from a Northern soldier to his students’ lives by comparing the letter to a phone call.  It was obvious that the students understood the comparison.

Next Ben reviewed the visit to the fort that had taken place yesterday.  The students thought the fort was “small”.  I was not sure if previous images or textbook illustrations of the fort made it seem larger in their minds versus the real thing or whether the impact the fort in U.S. history made it seem larger than life. They thought the museum was interesting, but they did not point out specific items that created interest.

Ben moved from the worksheet and Civil War discussion to a discussion on “Fast Food Nation”.  He read through the introduction which explained that one out of every eight workers in the United States has worked one time at McDonald’s and that the burger franchise hires an estimated one million people per year. There was a fair chance that these students might start their work history at McDs, like many kids all over the country.

The last class had a different relationship with Ben.  As the students jumped up to get their journals and start their warm up activity Ben pulled up his pant leg a little to show off his new socks and shoes, apparently a clothing recommendation by this class and proceeded to tuck his pant leg into his socks.  The class became engaged in Ben’s clothing choices with good, respectful humor and that atmosphere set the tone for the rest of the class period.  The class engaged in a good discussion on the upcoming “Super Tuesday” primary elections. One student remarked that he liked how Hillary answered questions versus Obama’s speeches.  Issues such as the war in Iraq, the price of gas and taxes were freely discussed.  In the process Ben tied several facts from previous days’ lessons into the conversation and the students made the connection.  Ben kept the discussion relevant to the students’ lives by using the analogy of “gang wars” while talking about the conflict between the Shi’ites and the Sunnis.  At the end of the period Ben foreshadowed the class events for tomorrow.  All in all, this class at the end of the day mirrored many of the classes I observed all over West Michigan.  The students were learning, they were engaged in the discussion and it was obvious they retained information from previous classes.

Video Interview, 2008

Defining Success, 2008

At the beginning of the interview Ben added some details about the situation into which he entered at St. John’s.  A full-time teacher did start the year, but her husband was relocated and the two “long-term” subs were not the best replacements.  Neither were they “long term”.  Ben told me that the subs basically gave the students worksheets each day and by the time Ben arrived he had “issues” he had to address right away.  These students were not taught, but rather the classroom was a “babysitting service”.  Ben said he thought that some of his preparation at GVSU gave him a good background in dealing with this situation and some of it was a unique experience.  He thought he had a good classroom management plan but nothing had prepared him to jump into a challenging situation in the middle or toward the end of a semester.  In Ben’s words, “Harry Wong (The First Day of School) didn’t have anything about how to handle a classroom for a day 89 (Ben T, v.t., p.1, 2008).  After the initial jolt of the situation Ben calmed himself down and realized, with some support from a few teachers at St. John’s, that he had the tools in order to deal effectively with the problems.  He soon realized that the problems he faced were no different than the struggles that many first-year teachers had.  He knew the challenges: 90% free and reduced lunch student population, new gangs trying to establish themselves in the area, a revolving door of principals, a failing school, but in Ben’s words, “the students, by far, were not failing students.  They haven’t been motivated.  They haven’t been pushed hard enough, and they haven’t had people that cared about them.  They had just kind of said, ‘whatever, I’m not going to do it.’  They just had the attitude of not doing it.  It doesn’t have anything to do with how smart they are and this other No Child Left Behind stuff.  They just need to be motivated and pushed to do it.” (Ben, v.t., p.2, 2008)

Content Background, 2008

Ben was a student at GVSU before the program offered much beyond Western Civilization and certainly the program did not press or require students to be versed in all areas of World History.  As a result, Ben struggled somewhat with specifics although he felt he had a good general background.  Unlike many students he did not sell back his textbooks at the end of the semester and his World History textbooks lined the shelf behind the desk.  Implicit was the idea that Ben needed continual learning in order to meet his instructional needs.  Ben cited a perception that many of the people in this study mentioned.  They took their content courses in the first four years at GVSU in order to complete their content major, but their fifth year was in the College of Education.  Despite teaching some of their content in their teacher-assisting and student teaching semesters, some of the details from their content courses had grown stale.  Ben did say that he quickly revived that content knowledge with some brief brush-up. While Ben admitted that his content interests lay with U.S. and military history, he quickly sought help from a colleague at the school and classmates at GVSU.  Knowing other teachers’ interests and how you might share information is a key to success in the classroom.  He did try to go it alone when he first started but soon realized that was a bad option.  No one knows it all.

Another challenge Ben and others had when they started their careers was the daily minutiae of the profession; paperwork, forms, how to create and enter grades and the other piles of stuff.  Ben said, “Just talking to some other teachers who have been here a while say, ‘Once you get to that rhythm of the next couple of years you can start not having to worry about staying after (school) two hours figuring how to set up your grade book on your computer.  It’s done.  It’s just click, click and away you go.” (Ben T, v.t., p.3-4, 2008)

Another challenge for Ben at St. John’s was the school’s daily schedule.  Ben had no experience teaching in an A/B block scheduling arrangement.  Preparing and teaching in a 90-minute block of time is not the same as a 45 minute or hour-long time period.  He did receive some help from the support materials that came with his classroom textbook. There was a section that gave suggestions on how to apply the content to a 90-minute class period.  Ben at first thought that he had to teach (direct instruction) for the entire time period, but then he realized the school policy of giving students time to work on their homework was a good one.  He would be able to help them with that work, especially those students who benefitted from the extra guidance.  Ben told me that many of his students live with their grandmas or aunts or a single mom who is working two to three jobs, supporting a large family.  Homework is not a priority and there was quite likely no parental oversight so he provided the supervision and the motivation to get their work done.

Strategies and Methods, 2008

Ben helped his students with reading strategies, how they should analyze questions, how to interpret bold-faced type in text and he realized that many of his students did not like to read. I heard them groan when Ben announced the four-page reading assignment for the day. He found out that 90% of his students were not going to read the assigned pages so he taught them how to skim-read.  Ben figured that if he helped the students find a workable strategy for success, they were more likely to stay engaged in the activity.  Ben made time to sit down with struggling students individually and help them work through ways of eliminating incorrect answers.  Once they were successful with a little help, they would be more likely to continue on their own.  He also realized that “every day was not going to be a wonderful, glorious great things day.  There’s going to be those days where…today we were supposed to have a pep rally…which got cancelled because of the big fight” (The fight was over some spilled juice and the two students involved were handcuffed and taken away.) (Ben T, v.t., p.5-6, 2008).

At that point Ben pointed to his green low-cut sneakers. Apparently that color and type of shoe was popular with the students at that time and for Ben to sport a pair of those shoes, tied with his stylin argyle socks, showed that he was respectful of part of their student culture.  I witnessed part of that respect during one of Ben’s classes.  A student who had a meeting as a member of the school’s Leadership Academy walked into and after class stopped by the student desk where I was sitting.  Ben had briefed his students about my visit. The student said, “You’re the guy from Michigan and I said ‘yeh’.  He said, ‘you have a good student, he’s a good teacher.’”  I didn’t solicit that response. Ben told me that same student introduced a student to Ben with the words, “This is the best teacher that you will never have.”  Ben let his students know that he had faced some of the same challenges in learning, sat at the same kinds of desks and struggled with the same types of assignments.  He acknowledged that he did not have the same types of struggles his students faced but he cared about their lives and their success.  His biggest problem with that respect was that students wanted to hang out in his classroom all the time, including, in one class period, a student who belonged in another class (Ben, v.t., p.7, 2008).  Despite that problem Ben told me he learned about respecting students from his preparation at GVSU.  “That for me was the big thing (I learned) and that was one thing that Grand Valley really pushed was that rapport building letting your students know you care and that’s like the golden ticket to teaching.  You can relate to your students and you let them know that you care and you can work with them and don’t be ‘black and white’ with them, always have that gray…when it comes to grades or anything else.” (Ben, v.t., p.7-8, 2008)

As I began to understand the challenges Ben faced, I asked if his college preparation gave him the background and experience in working in a school with so many of the students on Individualized Education Plans and so many students reading multiple levels below grade level.  Ben had several answers for this challenge.  He said the school district chose texts that aligned with the students’ reading ability and the teacher support materials helped Ben design lessons and activities to fit his students’ abilities.  He also applied what he learned student teaching at the middle school level in Michigan to his high school students in South Carolina.  He divided the class period into small chunks of time instead of trying to maintain their attention for the entire 90 minutes. This approach worked with his freshman students.  With the juniors it was a different matter.  The drop-out rate between the freshman and junior year was 60%.  A freshmen class total of 100 students would become 40 in two years, although some of those 40 students failed at least some of their classes so they might be spread out all through the four-year curriculum.  “Nacho” was one of those students.  He was supposed to be a sophomore but he was still taking freshmen level classes. In that case Ben did not look at what grade level was listed on the student’s report card.  “You have to look at them and say, ‘How can I help them along?” (Ben, v.t., p.8, 2008).

Ben admitted that teaching social studies content took a back seat to teaching these students how to read.  Many of my students, especially when I first arrived at GVSU, railed against the Content Literacy class.  They said they did not consider themselves English/Language Arts teachers.  They were History or Social Studies teachers.  Ben’s attitude had changed completely.  “But that class…is something very important.  It should be stressed. If your students can’t read, it’s very hard to teach them, no matter what subject you’re teaching.  That’s one class where I really dug back into to pull strategies out because that’s where a lot of my students struggle is with reading things and if they can’t read it they’re not going to do it and if they’re not going to do it, that’s my struggle” (Ben T., v.t., p.8-9, 2008).  One strategy from the literacy class that Ben employed was daily journaling.  He lets them ‘free write’ without “nitpicking them apart”. Anything to get their brains warmed up and writing (Ben, v.t., p.9, 2008).

Ben related a story of a female student whose first language was Spanish.  The student did not speak any English and in an already challenging classroom atmosphere she was in Ben’s rowdiest class.  Finding time to work with her one-on-one was difficult as he tried to maintain control in this class.  Speaking no Spanish himself Ben found a technological work around.  He found a website that translated his worksheets into Spanish, brought it to the student and asked if that worked for her.  Basically, he was creating a separate lesson for her.  She did not have an I.E.P., but she still needed the extra help.

Pearls of Wisdom, 2008

Ben’s first bit of advice was building rapport with the students.  Use student surveys to find their likes and dislikes.  He kept those survey folders and from time to time he flipped through them in order to remember what his students were all about.  If he had a problem with a student, he could return to the folder to find something that student liked so Ben might could use that information to make a connection to the student. “They have to like you as a person first before they will like you as a teacher” (Ben, v.t., p.10, 2008).  Following Harry Wong’s advice in the First Day of School Ben had a picture of his wife on his desk, a Tigers’ baseball banner on the wall behind his desk and other memorabilia that helped the students understand who Ben was.  He thought it was a mistake for a first-year teacher to come in the first day and “lay down the law”.  Ben received some pushback from another teacher in his school because of his approach with the students.  This teacher hoped that Ben, as a former Marine, would come into the school with a Marine’s attitude, whatever that meant to that particular teacher.  When Ben turned out to be a teacher who wanted to earn his students’ respect by caring for his students and showing his humanity, that teacher became upset.  Ben witnessed some of that same attitude from some of the administrators, but not all of the teachers (Ben, v.t., p.10-11, 2008).

Ben was open about the struggle that first-year teachers encounter.  He admitted to me that just a few weeks into his time at St. John’s he was ready to move back to Michigan, but slowly things improved.  The work was still tremendously time-consuming, the students still needed a lot of patience and effort, but working with those kids was worth the effort. By this point at the end of January things were starting to get a little bit easier.  He had established some routines.  He had found some ways to work around some of the challenges.  He found support among some of his colleagues at the school and his former classmates at GVSU.

Soon after my visit with Ben I received an email from him that he was leaving South Carolina and moving back to Michigan.  His wife was having some problems with her pregnancy and she was homesick.  A few months later I met with Ben at a coffee shop in Holland, Michigan.  Ben was working full time as a security officer in the West Ottawa school district and part-time as a corrections officer at the Ottawa County Jail (Ben T., v.t., p.5, 2015).  Ben thought at that time that the security job in the school might give him the inside track if there were any openings in the Social Studies Department, but it wasn’t meant to be.  Then he “fell in love” with the corrections job.  In Ben’s words, “If I could handle a classroom of 30 kids then I could handle 30 inmates in a cellblock.” (Ben, v.t., p.1, 2015)

Interview, 2015

My next contact with Ben came in April of 2015.  He had moved from his work in the Ottawa Country jail and after a year and half of part-time employment, Ben went to full-time employment at the Kent County Jail where he was for three years.  The Kent County salary and benefits compared well with starting teacher pay (Ben T., v.t., p.5, 2015).  Ben told me that his teaching background prepared him for his transition to corrections officer. “…my teaching background came in huge, knowing how to…like classroom management skills…learning how to talk to inmates like you would a student, learning how to de-escalate a situation.  I felt more prepared (for being a corrections officer) than…people who had been through a corrections program.  …Some of those philosophies you learn through teaching, your ‘Love and Logic’ or your ‘Choices’ and stuff like that, so I implemented a lot of (those philosophies) in my cellblock and I always had one of the quietest, easy run, just kind of laidback, no problems type of thing” (Ben, v.t., p.1, 2015). His approach worked so well that his lieutenants and captains started incorporating his philosophy into managing the jail.  Ben’s influence extended into classroom design and organization of the inmates in his cellblock. “I handled my cellblock like I did a classroom for the most part” (Ben, v.t., p.2, 2015).

How the degree helped in the current career, 2015

Ben credited his college degree with his various jobs, even though those jobs were not directly teaching in a school.  His degree and his military service assured his employers that he could learn and he had the persistence to follow through with a course of study over a long period of time.  In answer to a potential question about using his teaching degree in his career track thus far Ben had this to say, “You learn to take what you have and adapt it to your new life and you take what you can learn from your past and mold it into your new future (Ben, v.t., p.3, 2015).

But I did not meet Ben at the jail. I met him at the Kalamazoo Armory.  Kent County was talking about lay-offs at the jail and Ben was toward the bottom of the seniority list.  He was worried about insurance and benefits for his family if he lost his job so he looked at the military, the Reserves or the National Guard. After talking to a recruiter who told Ben that he would be on the officer track because of his four-year college degree, Ben signed with the Army Reserves in 2010 while he was still working at the jail. His Reserve unit was soon called up for active duty to be sent to Afghanistan.  My eyes widened at this point of the interview.  I knew Ben would go if necessary, but I didn’t think that was what he thought would happen when he “re-upped”.  At that point he was asked if he would rather stay in Grand Rapids and be the rear deck commander and take care of the soldiers who were not deploying at that time.  He took a leave of absence from the jail and soon realized that he really enjoyed being back in the military.  He put his packet together and an application and was soon posted to Kalamazoo in a supply sergeant role, doing logistics for everything in the unit.  He came to the realization that if he stayed at the jail he would need another 23 years before he retired, but due to his prior time in the Marines he would make his 20 years after only 14 more years in the military and then he could go on to another career (Ben T., v.t., p.4, 2015).  He was down to 9 more years when I talked to him in 2015. He told me that some of his friends who went the military route from high school were nearing their retirement time already.

At that point in the interview Ben told me that his contact with the Charleston County School District did not end when he left in February of 2008.  The district sent a recruiting team to GVSU in March 2008 and Ben was asked to help recruit teachers for the district.  He must have made quite an impression in his brief time down there.  He explained that he and another young teacher were doing all they could do to engage their students in their learning but another of their colleagues just handed out worksheets each day.  Ben was in one of the most challenging schools in the county and he thought the district either put new teachers in that school or teachers the district was trying to force out.  He still thought highly of the Charleston County District.  He knew that some administrators and teachers cared about the students and wanted to help them be successful in life. Ben explained that he was not ready for the difference in how schools were organized in the South versus in Michigan.  The Charleston County district featured 12 high schools and to Ben’s estimation those schools were treated differently.  Some schools were “blue ribbon” schools and those schools had students with high test scores, with plenty of supplies and technology.  Ben’s school had one outdated copy machine and the teachers were given three reams of copy paper to last the whole school year.  Ben commented that GVSU might do a better job of explaining how different states operate their school districts since so many GVSU grads leave Michigan to teach elsewhere (Ben, v.t., p.6, 2015).

Ben elaborated upon his comment about the differences in school districts to the differences in how different people and cultures view history. He touched upon how the Civil War or the War Between the States or the War of Northern Aggression was taught differently in the North than it was in the South.  At one point, Ben remarked that one person in the South said, “You (meaning the North) attacked us.” (Ben T., v.t., p.6, 2015)  Ben said the cultural differences and different views of U.S. History were reinforced by all the contacts he has made during the time in the military.

Ben’s biggest challenge was how he started his teaching job at St. John’s.  He came in during a semester in a challenging situation, with only a few days to prepare, into a culture that was new to him, without much support from the administration or the teaching staff.  He was on his own.  He said that even though his situation was unique some of the same challenges are faced with teachers who graduate in December and seek immediate employment.  The best-case scenario is starting the year off with plenty of time to prepare.  So even though beginning teachers might be desperate for a job they should carefully consider the challenges of starting their career mid-year (Ben, v.t., p.8, 2015).

Evaluations, 2015

My next question for Ben concerned how he was evaluated as a teacher and how he used evaluations.  My question was open-ended and several of the teachers immediately applied the question to how they evaluated their students versus how they were evaluated by administrators. Throughout my career I have always viewed the tests or assessments I have given my students as tests or assessments of my teaching as well as assessments of my students’ learning.  If there was a major, or even minor, problem with how students answered a question or how many students missed an answer then the problem was probably mine and not theirs.

Ben approached my question in the lens of his current military occupation.  He referred to AARs or After Action Reviews.  He talked about four categories: 1.) What was supposed to happen today? or “Ok, class, what were we supposed to do today? And someone would say, ‘We were supposed to learn about the French Revolution. Ok, what did we do today? And someone else would say, ‘Well, we started to talk about the French Revolution and then we got sidetracked and started talking about Baltimore and the riots going on right now.’”  Then Ben modified the process again and rephrased the questions into “What were three good things we learned today?” and “What three things can we improve upon the next time?”  Ben then made the conversion to the AARs and related how the military reports stay with the unit so the next leadership knows what had happened in the past and how the people in that situation made corrections so that a good result might be repeated or a bad result was not repeated.  Ben said it might be more beneficial for future teachers to have peer evaluations along with evaluations from their professors.  Extending that to current teachers the evaluation process might include their fellow teachers and not just administrators.  The dynamic between peers might be more constructive and less stressful (Ben, v.t., p.10-11, 2015).

Pearls of Wisdom, 2015

Ben’s first pearl was couched in the form of a request.  The university’s alumni association did a good job of tracking down graduates and asking for financial support, but what Ben and other grads wanted was an easy way to network with the faculty and grads.  Between my two sabbatical trips I had created a Facebook page for the “Grand Valley State Social Studies and History Majors” and I referred all the people involved in the study to that group. Several took me up on the offer and joined the group.  The History department also established a “Twitter” feed (now called X) and some of the grads from the Department have started to follow that connection to social media.  There has been some sharing of teaching resources and lesson plan ideas, as well as job sharing on the Facebook group.

Ben also wanted current students to confront their future career plans.  What if they were not able to find immediate employment in their chosen career or certification area?  Do they have contingencies if those plans do not come to fruition?  What might they do with their liberal arts background?  Ben suggested that they should spend some time thinking about their options and perhaps the faculty and staff might help lead that discussion.  This suggestion might be difficult for the university.  If a person dedicates the time, effort and money for a degree is it appropriate to engage in a discussion about the students’ options if their major does not end in the specific job they wanted?  In my classes I often ask students who state they want to teach a specific grade level or subject if they would take a position that was still covered by their teaching certificate.  In those classroom discussions most students say they are prepared to take that job, but I have not followed up with any research to see if they acted on those statements.

Ben’s last bit of advice was for grads to realize that the exact situation in which they started their career might have very little to do with their preparation at the university.  Even with two different school placements and the content and pedagogy courses that equate with a five-year program before graduation, reality might be quite different.  Flexibility, adaptability and persistence are characteristics that would lead toward success in this circumstance.  It also helps for grads to do their homework.  In Ben’s case St. John’s High School from the outside looked like a new school building in a relatively benign neighborhood but outward appearances were very deceiving.  Soon after his arrival at the school the principal who hired Ben was gone. The challenges presented by lack of financial support and the lack of family support made for a totally different picture than that of the nice looking brick building on the school website (http://stjohns.ccsdschools.com, accessed January 27, 2018).  After the formal interview Ben also suggested talking to other teachers and the staff in order to form a real picture of the school before making any kind of commitment (Ben T., v.t., p.17, 2015).