The Gift of a Mentor

“A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.”

Jackie Robinson

Tony CariCari at Erskine College

Those who study the teaching profession have found that four major factors influence teacher recruitment and retention: compensation, preparation, mentoring, and teaching conditions. All of these are important, but one is crucial. Mentors can’t do a thing about your meager first-year teacher salary; but their willingness to walk beside you, listen, and offer wise advice can make up for all the things the university didn’t cover in your teacher training program. Later on, after years in the classroom test your will to continue, you just might choose to stay if a mentor helps you learn the power of the right fit.

Mentors guided me through my first years of teaching and beyond. I was lucky that my first job fresh out of the University of South Carolina’s College of Education in 1993 was at Clover Middle School in Clover, SC, – a community affectionately known as “The Town with Love in the Middle.” I’ve always agreed this is an apt name for the place.

Immediately after Principal Ernestine Wright, the first person to welcome me to the school and to the town was head custodian Jerry Adams. “You can call me Catfish,” he told me. “Everyone does.” Catfish always unlocked my classroom ahead of my arrival each morning. He often stopped by to check on me, too, as I was usually one of the first teachers in the building and almost always nervous about some aspect of my new career. Catfish never left our morning visits without dispensing words of wisdom as he pushed his large rectangular broom and the trash in front of it out the door. One particularly hard week, he stopped by to present me with the Clover Optimist Club creed on a plaque.

“Promise yourself to be too large for worry, too noble for anger, too strong for fear, and too happy to permit the presence of trouble,” the plaque reads. I considered Catfish Adams to be my first mentor; and though its words are fading now, the plaque he gave me has been on every teaching desk of my career.

My mentors were also veteran educators who took first-year teachers at Clover Middle under their wings. They did this not because they were asked to by administration but because they considered training us to be part of their own callings as teachers.

Esther Davis and I celebrate her retirement.

Esther Davis, a fellow sixth grade math and science teacher at our school who was nearing retirement, taught me to command a classroom’s attention without raising my voice. She called her students “Mr. James” or “Miss Amanda,” instead of just by their first names. If students chose to talk while she was delivering instruction, Esther stopped whatever she was saying and patiently waited in silence. The “teacher look” she gave her students let them know of her displeasure. No words of chastisement were even necessary. In fact, no instruction time was lost either, as usually no one else in the room chose to interrupt her after that.

If anyone talked while Esther escorted her students to lunch – always on the right side of the hallway “on the blue tile, single file” — Esther stopped the line and stayed wherever she was, at the front or the back. “We’re waiting for you, Mr. Benjamin,” she would say calmly, softly, and even with a smile interspersed with her teacher looks. The rest of the students waited silently for Mr. Benjamin to straighten up, and then the line moved on.

“Respect is the key,” she often said. High above her chalkboard was a poster of a large key with those words inside it. This, she said, was the only classroom rule that really mattered. “You will earn your students’ respect by showing respect to them,” she told me during one of our first conversations. “If there is mutual respect between a teacher and her students, there will not be many discipline problems,” she said.

Esther lived her belief every single day. I was mesmerized by her commanding presence, which never involved a raised voice in the hallway or classroom in all six of the years I taught with her. I studied her every move and strived to be just like her.

Vicki Gibson

Vicki Gibson, a fellow sixth grade teacher who adored science and wore a white lab coat in her classroom every day, also volunteered to be my mentor. She met with me before my first day of work and walked me through the entire science curriculum, focusing particularly on the hands-on lab experiments. Maybe it was because she knew I was coming to teaching from the journalism world, or maybe it was just that she noticed the terror in my eyes as she demonstrated our first experiment on mimosa seed germination. But she checked on me daily that first year and often gave up her own planning time to help me set up labs.

At the beginning of my fourth year of teaching, a new PE teacher joined our Clover Middle School staff. Tony Caricari had New Jersey roots and a knack for making homemade cheesecakes that became the hit of staff parties. Classroom management was a breeze for Tony, and I thought at first it was because of his military background in the Coast Guard reserves or the fact that he was a man. Children, I noticed, always seemed to respond immediately to the authority of the men in our building.

But right away we all noticed Tony bonded with the kids he taught and coached because he took the time to talk to each one, hear their stories, and call each one by name. Tony was firm but fun and caring, and so the children adored him. While working his daily recess duties, Tony talked to students and truly listened to them as they shared about their lives and interests.

Tony and I had about the same number of years of experience, but I sought his advice on teaching often and came to think of him as a mentor. I followed his lead and spent recess duties that year talking to my own students — especially Clint, who loved sharing about his latest fishing exploits. By the end of that year, Clint and I had discussed brim and bass and the various baits he used to catch them until I felt like an expert. For an end-of-school-year gift, Clint purchased me my very own tackle box, complete with a couple of spinners and some fishing line inside.

In 1999, Tony and I both left Clover Middle School. I moved to the Columbia, SC. He left to take on his first administrative role as assistant principal of Clover’s Bethany Elementary School. I heard through our mutual friends that Tony was thriving as a school leader, just as we all knew he would.

I, on the other hand, was floundering in a new district and school, where I was still teaching sixth grade science. In the 1990s and early 2000s in South Carolina, there were rarely openings in language arts, my longed-for teaching assignment. Those that did become available were given to teachers who had asked for and waited for those jobs long before me. 

Keeping the students’ attention seemed to be getting harder. Clover Middle had housed only about 300 5^th and 6^th grade students. My new school had about 900 students, and each day I was teaching four classes of science for 55 minutes each. Most of my students seemed much more excited for the end of class bell to ring than about anything I was teaching them.

My friend and mentor Margaret Boyd, who taught fifth grade language arts and social studies at Clover Middle, was quick to sympathize and added that apathetic behavior wasn’t limited to the students in my suburban Columbia school.

“I could ride into my classroom on a white horse and they probably wouldn’t notice,” she joked one Saturday when we met for a shopping excursion. “I think they would just ignore me and keep right on looking inside their book bags for the notebooks I asked them to get out 20 minutes ago!”

But I was struggling with more than classroom management problems. I was eight years into my teaching career and felt totally ineffective, not just as a science teacher, but as any kind of teacher. I felt my joy draining each time I walked my students across the hall to the science lab for experiments. What good was teaching them the proper use of balance beams and graduated cylinders ever going to do for them? Barely anyone seemed interested. I didn’t feel inspired to integrate reading and writing activities into my science curriculum as I once had in Clover. My heart just wasn’t in it anymore.

I decided maybe it was best to return to my writing career, where I felt confident in my abilities. On a cold December day, I traveled to Chicago, where I was invited to interview for a position as an assistant editor for a textbook publishing company. I was offered the position and initially said yes, but I called them back a few days later to decline. It wasn’t just the snow I had seen there piled on frozen Lake Michigan or the wind that cut through my thin coat while I walked along Michigan Avenue. I said no because I couldn’t imagine myself in an office all day, staring at a computer screen. No children’s voices would be calling my name. There would be no heading to the lunchroom at precisely 12:17 p.m. leading a line of excited students. No hastily drawn hearts with the words “You are the best teacher in the world” underneath would be appearing unexpectedly on my desk.

I returned to my science classroom feeling defeated. I had chickened out on what could have been a great adventure in the big Windy City. I had tried to leave teaching but couldn’t, and yet I didn’t know how I was going to continue.

Somehow news of my plight reached my friend and mentor Tony Caricari back in Clover. A lengthy email from him arrived in my in-box one evening soon after. “A little bird told me you are considering leaving teaching,” his message began. “Before you decide, let me tell you a story.”

Two of the most important decisions of Tony’s life had both revolved around long road trips, he wrote. The first road trip eventually led him to teaching. The second one brought him back to it.

He began his story with the time he and his buddy Bob O’Hoppe drove Bob’s old Mercury Cougar from New Jersey to rural South Carolina over Memorial Day Weekend 1983. The two were already playing baseball together at Ocean County College in Toms River, NJ, but they wanted to check out the program at Erskine, a four-year college in Due West, SC. They had been intrigued by an informational brochure they received from Erskine’s head baseball coach Dr. Harry Stille who, like Bob and Tony, was a native of New Jersey.

What should have been a 13-hour trip by car ended up taking nearly 19 hours.                                 

“All of a sudden with about a third of the trip left to go, the Cougar’s thermostat goes crazy and the radiator overflows,” Tony wrote. “We had to stop every 20 minutes to add water.”

Using paper maps and following country road signs, the two felt they were in the middle of nowhere when they saw Erskine’s campus, which at the time housed about 500 students. It was a holiday weekend, so the place was a ghost town. They were about 20 miles from the city of Greenwood, SC, and almost 50 miles from the nearest major airport in Greenville.

“We thought, wow, this is really, really country!” Tony recalled. “Bob’s first reaction was ‘Let’s go back home!’”

But after they met with Coach Stille and toured the baseball facilities, they were impressed – especially with the coach and the indoor batting cage he showed them. Though it seemed a world away from their New Jersey hometowns, Erskine felt like the right fit. The two signed to play for the school’s Flying Fleet baseball team, Bob at shortstop and Tony at first base.

Tony would pursue a bachelor’s in business management and go on to earn the prestigious Jake Todd Award as Erskine’s top student-athlete in 1985. He made friends he still treasures and met the love of his life, Debbie, who would become his wife.

He graduated from Erskine in 1986 and later earned a master’s degree in sports management at East Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania, even working an internship with the New Jersey Nets NBA team in the public relations department. But after he finished grad school in 1989 and heard the head baseball coaching position was open at Erskine, Tony headed back to his alma mater to coach the Flying Fleet.

During the two years he served as coach, Tony felt a calling to teach; so, he took classes and earned his certificate to teach kindergarten through 12^th grade physical education. In 1991, eight years after that fateful road trip from New Jersey to Erskine, Tony and Debbie were married, and Tony began his teaching career.

A series of road trips in a white delivery van four years later became the next journey to change his life.

In 1995, Tony took a year off from teaching PE after three years at a Lancaster, SC, middle school and one year at two Rock Hill elementary schools. Though he enjoyed his work, when Tony tried looking ahead to the future, he couldn’t see himself still teaching for the 20+ years he would need to collect his retirement pension. He wondered if he should rethink his career path and go back into the business world.

To support his family, which now included Debbie and their one-year-old son Austin, Tony took a job driving copy paper, pharmaceutical supplies, and other goods from Fort Mill to Charleston, SC every day and on to Hilton Head twice a week. His delivery routes included businesses, hospitals, storage units, shipping docks, train stations, and prisons.

Tony described the hours of watching the road’s yellow lines glide beside his van as long and monotonous; but they were a godsend. They gave him time to think, as well as perspective. He realized he missed teaching physical education, but he missed the students most of all. He missed the fulfillment he found in being the positive role model that many of them were missing at home. He loved coaching them, building relationships with them, and being their mentor.

Sports had been a lifesaver for him growing up. Sports gave him positive self-esteem and confidence, and they kept him out of trouble. Sports really teach about life, Tony reflected. Teamwork, responsibility, effort, perseverance, putting yourself out there, trying new things – it’s all there in sports. He knew if he could teach kids what he knew, it could be fulfilling. Maybe instead of leaving teaching, he just needed to find “the right fit.”

Somewhere in those dark hours along Interstate 77, Tony felt a question burning in his heart: If all of us who love them leave the classroom, who will teach our children? Who will teach MY children?

In August 1996, two weeks before school was about to begin, Tony answered an ad for the PE opening at Clover Middle School. He was interviewed by our principal, Miss Wright, who called the very next day to offer him a tour of school – and the job. At Clover Middle, Tony knew he had found the “fit” he was seeking. His days of driving the delivery van were over.

When you’re in the right place, he wrote to me in his email, you feel inspired to grow and continue. As a new teacher back in Lancaster, he had thought about becoming a school administrator someday. But teaching and coaching in Clover and learning from Miss Wright and later principal Bennie Bennett, Tony was inspired to go back to school to earn his administrative certification. “Maybe it is not that you don’t want to teach anymore,” he wrote to me. “Maybe you just haven’t found the right fit for you.”

 

Tony coaching baseball in Clover

I read and re-read Tony’s email message in the days that followed. I was amazed that after not seeing or talking to me for years, my mentor would take the time to reach out to me at such a critical moment. And I wondered who had told him of my thoughts about leaving teaching. Turns out the “little bird” was a mutual friend who had run into Tony at a meeting at the Clover School District office. Their encounter, I decided, was not just chance. It was divine intervention.

As the school year came to a close and teachers received their contracts, I still wasn’t sure if I would sign mine. But I kept thinking about Tony’s words about “the right fit.” It was true that I had never fulfilled my desire to teach language arts. I had never spent my days reading the great works of literature with students and showing them how authors craft their words into works of art. I had never helped a child grapple through the hard work of starting a piece of writing and polishing it until it was ready to share with an audience.

If I was going to continue in education, I had to find the right place — the right fit for me. My quest took me back to the Clover School District for the next school year. I was hired by Principal Pat King as a 6^th grade language arts and social studies teacher at Clover’s Crowders Creek Elementary School. My fears about having no experience as a language arts teacher were allayed when Mrs. King offered me the job as I sat across from her at the interview table. It didn’t matter that she had only talked to me for 30 minutes. She said she had a knack for seeing the hearts of people she interviewed and chose to hire. “I can show a teacher everything she needs to know about the curriculum, but I can’t teach her how to love children,” she said. “Loving children is the most important thing.”

That’s when I knew it – even before she showed me my new classroom. I had found my right fit. Teaching at Crowders made me excited to go to school each morning. Mrs. King sent me to countless professional development sessions and partnered me with mentors who were passionate about inspiring kids to love reading and writing. I began wondering how I could actually be paid to have so much fun at work.

Tony later joined me at Crowders Creek as an assistant principal for one year before returning to Bethany Elementary as the school’s principal. I ran into him at district functions and always asked about his work and his wife and children. His second son, Chris, had been born while we worked together at Clover Middle. Family always came first to Tony, and I knew it could not be easy juggling the hard work of leading a school with the needs of his family. As his young sons were growing up, Tony realized that being a principal was causing him to miss important moments in his sons’ lives. I knew it was not an easy decision for him, but I admired that, in order to be more available to his family, Tony stepped aside from his administrative role in 2004 and left Clover to return to teaching and coaching.

Tony at Fort Mill Middle School

He ended up in the nearby Fort Mill School District at Fort Mill Middle School, where he coached the 7^th grade football team and taught PE. As it turns out, the school also needed a 7^th grade girls’ basketball coach, so Tony stepped in to help. The Lady Yellow Jackets ended up winning the York County middle school basketball conference championship that year. He still has the basketball the team members signed and gave to him to remember their accomplishment.

In 2005, he was asked to become an assistant principal at Fort Mill Middle. The fit was right, and the timing was right for him and his family, so Tony said yes. Tony was still thriving there as assistant principal 10 years later when I contacted him about a literacy specialist job I saw advertised in the Fort Mill School District. I had been teaching for 21½ years by then and was ready for a new challenge. Just as he did years before, Tony counseled me via email as I considered the new role. I have no doubt that divine intervention worked its magic again. The position was to be split between Tony’s school and another of the district’s middle schools, Banks Trail. I was hired, and my mentor and I were working together again.

It was obvious from my first day there that Tony naturally blended his coaching, business management, and military experience in his administrative role at Fort Mill Middle. He enjoyed establishing systems for school discipline, routines, duties, testing, and schedules. “There is power in routines,” Tony told me. “You have to have a system in place, or there is chaos.”

His school also had a family atmosphere. He and the other members of the administrative team had worked hard to keep morale high. A key element, he said, was listening to teachers, students, and parents, really hearing their concerns, and trying to make things better for them whenever they could. I often saw him in conversation with teachers or staff members, asking about their families or their hobbies and interests. He remembered their children’s names and asked about them, too. He was still making cheesecakes for his staff and still building relationships with students. Every day he talked with students in the cafeteria and on the playground as he served his duties.

Literacy specialists were hired for each middle school in our district the following year, and I was assigned to work only at Banks Trail. Though we no longer saw each other often, Tony checked on me any time a meeting brought him to my school.

Tony was named principal of Fort Mill Middle in 2016 after the school’s long-time principal retired. He continued nurturing the family atmosphere that made the school unique. His faculty included many veteran teachers who had worked there for most of their careers – some for 40+ years — and who continued to work there under Tony’s leadership.

Researchers often point to the importance of supportive and nurturing school leaders as factors in teachers’ decisions to stay at a school. Tony knew this instinctively, because those kinds of leaders had inspired him to stay and grow in his career. Our former Clover Middle School principal Bennie Bennett often told us, “Never ask anyone to do more than you are willing to do yourself.” Tony believed this too and lived that mantra as Fort Mill Middle’s principal. If there was a spill in the hallway, he was more likely to clean it up himself than call a custodian.

In 2018, when I heard that Tony was going to repurpose his recess duty hat into a golf hat and retire after 26 years in the education business, I went to his retirement party at the school. Tony’s wife, sons, daughter-in-law, and baby grandson were all present for the celebration, as was Tony’s mother. Teachers dressed in baseball uniforms told stories of Tony’s glory days on the field at Erskine and shared special memories they will treasure of him as their school’s leader. The faculty cheered for him as it was announced that Tony would celebrate his retirement with a road trip to see his beloved New York Yankees play at Yankee Stadium. His buddy Bob O’Hoppe and three other Erskine baseball teammates would be joining him.

 I asked my mentor what he’d remember most about his years in education, and I wasn’t surprised that it is the relationships he built along the way. “I am curious, and I like to know about people and their stories,” he said. “The more you build relationships with people, the more likely you are to have their respect. People feel valued if they know you care about them.”

Tony hopes there will come a day when the teaching profession is highly respected again, and more young people will choose it as their career. Of all professions, he said, teaching should be most valued. “We are like the police, firefighters, and EMTs,” he said. “We are all first responders, but teachers work every day with the most precious material of all – our children.”

Tony thought back to his road trips of long ago when the mother of a former student stopped by to reflect and congratulate him on his retirement. “When the time is right,” she said, “the next thing you’re meant to do will be right in front of you.” In the meantime, she suggested he take some time to discover “the power of neutral.”

“When you drive a stick shift, you have to put it in first gear to push up a hill. Then, once you get up the hill and get going, you can shift to a lower gear or drop it in neutral. That’s when you can coast for a while, look ahead and behind you, and really appreciate what’s around you. That’s what I’m going to do,” Tony said.

Now, it’s two years later; and after 32 years as an educator and public relations writer in South Carolina’s public schools, I too have announced my retirement. My husband Brian has accepted a new job, and we recently moved to Florida. As I prepared for our move, I stood on the precipice of this major life change with many questions swirling in my heart. What adventures await Brian and me in our new home? What would it be like to teach for the first time in a state that is not South Carolina? Is there perhaps another calling I might answer in this, my life’s next chapter?

Once again I sought out my mentor — this time for guidance on how to navigate the retirement road ahead. I knew that after spending some time in neutral, Tony had felt the lure of the road calling to him again. So, he joined forces with his son Chris, and they started their own trucking company. One afternoon Tony drove by to see me at Banks Trail after he and Chris returned home from a week on the road. Tony’s congratulations and well wishes for me and Brian were full of encouragement and excitement, and his advice came from the well of his large heart and his own life’s experience.

“Take a breath and some time to reflect, then enjoy cruising in neutral,” he said. “When the time is right, you’ll know exactly what to do next.”

The gift of a mentor. Wise words…at just the moment they are needed. Sounds like great advice to me, Tony. That’s just what I’m going to do.

For the Love of Music

“Most of my students probably aren’t going to be professional musicians; but the motivation, the responsibility, the perseverance they learn is going to benefit them throughout their lives. I teach a whole lot more than just band in my class.”

Kirk Godbey

Kirk Godbey was just a toddler the day his fingers first found the keyboard of his mother’s piano. From that moment, Kirk fell in love with the old mahogany upright — and with the music he’s been making ever since. Whether he’s playing piano, clarinet, oboe, baritone, saxophone, bassoon, or drums, Kirk still feels the spark that lit his passion for music more than 50 years ago. Though he is a 34-year veteran band instructor in Fort Mill, SC, and could retire any time; Kirk has no plans to stop now. In this new normal of school during the COVID-19 pandemic, he just puts on his mask and face shield every morning and greets his students, both in person and virtually. “The students need dedicated teachers now more than ever,” Kirk says.

 “Music is my soul. When I hear or perform something that really speaks to me, it’s almost transcendent. I’ve always been 100 percent enthralled by music, and so it just exudes from me. My students sense it and realize that because I expect much of myself, I will expect much of them. When we’re here in my classroom, we’re all into what we’re doing. They see from me what it can be like for them if they work hard and practice and hone their skills.”

In his band room at Banks Trail Middle School, Kirk helps novice sixth graders choose and begin to play the instruments that are right for them. He guides his seventh graders as they develop and polish their skills. Then, remembering their first tentative notes, he marvels as his eighth graders blossom into accomplished musicians and students ready for high school and beyond.

Each morning, Kirk arrives at school at least an hour before his students. In the hushed stillness of the lamp-lit band room, he enjoys a cup of coffee, tweaks his lesson plans, and looks forward to the day ahead. Soon, a procession of musicians will be by to drop off their instruments and greet their teacher. “I practiced for an hour last night!” one student proclaims as he places his trombone in the storage room. “Fantastic!” Kirk replies.

“I teach because I can’t imagine doing anything else,” Kirk says. “It’s where I feel most at home. Helping students learn to read music and express themselves through musical instruments is such an exciting and rewarding way to spend every day.” Band is about much more than learning to play an instrument, Kirk says. It’s about discipline, perseverance, and resilience — skills that will benefit his students long after their band days come to an end.

“My students take away a sense of community and cooperation and develop patience beyond what a typical adolescent is capable of. They learn to appreciate striving for a long-term goal and that there is always that next level to work toward. Best of all, they make friends they’ll have for a lifetime. Some of my best friends today were in high school band with me. When we see each other, we still pick up as if no time has passed.”

Kirk works with the complete spectrum of musicians — “from those who are right there with me in their motivation, passion, and drive to excel, to those who are there because their friends are there and to have a good time.” Yet no matter their motivation for taking his class, Kirk’s students discover that their teacher tirelessly strives to find the right strategies to help them grow as musicians.

“Maybe it’s because I’m stubborn, or because I’ve had good teachers along the way. I know what can be done. I’m very competitive by nature — sometimes with showing off my bands, but more so because I know what my students can achieve. They are intelligent and talented but not always motivated. The key is to find that nugget to inspire them to work hard and try their best.”

One of Kirk’s trademarks — and he believes one of his best teaching strategies — is listening to each of his students play individually in class every week. “It’s an opportunity for one-on-one feedback and to help with any technique a student might need. When they’re playing for me, I treat it as a master class. The students expect feedback not just from me but from other members of the class. There’s nothing more frightening than performing in front of their peers, but I make sure my band room is a safe, supportive environment where students expect to be challenged. They know that they will have my support as well as support from their peers”.

The critiques build character and confidence and help them to be less afraid of the criticisms they will face in the real world, he says. “They realize they can do this, and with time they’re not afraid to perform in front of others anymore. That’s a skill that’s hard to come by.”

From the time he began taking piano lessons in third grade, Kirk knew that music would guide his life’s path. He took up the clarinet as a sixth grader in middle school band, but he quickly figured out how to play other instruments just by studying fingering charts and begging his fellow bandmates to guide him. “I just knew this was my thing! I loved listening to music, making music, and discovering the way instruments work. It just clicked for me. It was just fascinating.”

As a ninth grader at Radford High School near Roanoke, Va., Kirk watched as his band director, Bill Bondurant, taught half the band their placements for the marching performance drill. Then, Kirk took it upon himself to help out by teaching the drill to the other half of the band. “Drill design was mostly symmetrical, so I figured we could do this teaching of drill placement in half the time. There was a pattern that was so logical; so I thought, why don’t I just help him do this? I just seemed to know what to do. Everything just seemed to come naturally to me.”

Bondurant took Kirk under his wing and showed him how to run a rehearsal as well as how the process of designing and writing drill worked. From then on, Kirk helped not only with teaching drill to his high school band classmates but also with the band’s color guard team. He studied designs and moves that could be used by the color guard to enhance the band’s performance, and soon he was designing drill for them, too.

 “I didn’t know what I was doing, but I just visualized what I wanted the team to do on the field and said, ‘Why don’t we do this?’ and then taught them those moves. It turns out what I was doing was really innovative.”

His senior year of high school, Kirk earned the honor of being his band’s drum major. Standing on a podium directing his fellow band members each week as they performed on the football field, Kirk dreamed of one day directing bands of his own. He chose James Madison University in Virginia’s Shenandoah Mountains for college and graduated in 1986 with a bachelor’s degree in music education. His specialties were clarinet and oboe, and upon graduation he was certified to teach K-12 elementary music, chorus, and middle and high school band. 

Kirk had worked throughout his college years with neighboring high school bands teaching instrument technique, marching drill, and color guard drill; and he considered staying near home in Virginia as he looked for his first teaching job. Kirk was an only child and was close to his parents and extended family. Until he went away to college, he seldom traveled outside his zip code.

“My family was poor, but I didn’t know we were,” Kirk recalls. “My father was a barber, and my mom was a homemaker and seamstress. She was also the most frugal person I have ever known. If there was an ounce of something in a jar, she would put it back in the fridge and use it somehow.  I smile to this day when I notice that I instinctively turn off every light in the house as I exit a room or save that last drop of something for later.”

What they lacked in money, his parents made up for in encouragement and undying support for their son’s musical interests. Kirk has never forgotten the many nights his parents listened to him “banging piano keys” or playing something 500 times while composing on the piano. They never once complained about the series of squeaks and honks they endured as he taught himself to play a variety of woodwind instruments. 

Growing up in his Appalachian Mountain home, Kirk learned from his family to prioritize relationships over things — a value system he still steers by. “I grew up with lots of aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends. I knew I was loved, and so it was not hard for me to love other people. That is something I brought with me to the classroom. I’ve always wanted my students to know I care about them, and so I make it a priority to build trusting relationships with them and with their parents. My word is important. If I tell you I’ll do something, I will do it. I don’t want to let someone down who is counting on me.”

Though his family ties were strong and there were teaching opportunities in Virginia, Kirk felt a stirring in his heart when he saw an advertisement for a band teaching job in Fort Mill, SC. He consulted his high school band director, Mr. Bondurant, who had taught in nearby Rock Hill, SC, early on in his career. Bondurant knew first-hand of the Fort Mill High School Band and the bevy of state championship trophies they had earned since the 1970s. He wrote Kirk a letter of recommendation and encouraged him to apply. It was time, Bondurant said, for Kirk to spread his wings and fly in a new place. 

The day Kirk was offered and accepted his first teaching job in Fort Mill was a life-changer. “It’s a band town, and it has a long, rich history of being supportive as a community. When I look back, I sometimes feel like I was given the golden ticket. I was a poor country mountain boy, and getting to come to Fort Mill was a gift.  I’m not sure I would have picked me back in the day when I was just beginning, but I attribute it all to Mr. Bondurant and the letter he wrote for me. He really changed my life.”

When Kirk began his career in Fort Mill in 1986, the town had only one high school and one middle school. The high school band had 200 members, which was double the size of the band Kirk had performed with in high school. In his new position, his time was split between teaching band at Fort Mill Middle and working as an assistant director at the high school. 

His first Thanksgiving on the job, Kirk traveled with the high school band to New York City to march in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. “I had never been to New York. I was fascinated by the floats, the balloons, and how it felt to march with the band down the New York City streets. It was a moment I’ll never forget.”

Since then, Kirk has accompanied the band to competitions and performances in such destinations as Europe, New York, California, and Hawaii. Two additional high schools have opened in Fort Mill during his 34 years in the district, but he has remained affiliated primarily with Fort Mill High’s band program. For almost all of his career, he has designed Fort Mill High’s marching drill and served as visual coordinator of marching and color guard placement. He calls the marching band’s performances  a “symphony of sights and sounds — a coordinated musical theater extravaganza on a football field.”

Marching band consumes most of his free time after school from August through November. Along with designing and writing the show, he attends the high school band’s practices at least three times a week. When the show’s design is complete, he turns to the job of clean-up, making sure every student is performing to their highest potential. “I will fix the mistakes and adjust students’ individual positions — orienting bodies and turning shoulders and helping students with their individual techniques. At any given moment, if something has gone awry musically, I can pull groups of students together to help them fix errors that need fixing so the show can go on.”

Looking back, Kirk says the best part of his job is not the many exciting travel memories he has collected, the plethora of award-winning marching drills he’s designed, or the 20+ state championships he’s helped the Fort Mill High band bring home. For Kirk, it is the magic of watching children learn to play their instruments for the first time. That magic – and the music — has kept him coming back to his classroom all these years.

“It’s those moments when children light up because they love what they’re doing, or they play something and get notes out of their instruments that aren’t dinosaur sounds, or the advanced students have an electric performance on a piece of music we’ve been practicing. It’s not so much what I’ve done but the product that lets me know I’ve made a difference.”

Kirk has focused his career on creating a middle school feeder program for Fort Mill’s high school bands. Under his leadership in the 1980s, the middle school program grew to 200 beginners and had close to 400 students across grades 6-8. In the following three decades, he went on to help open three new middle schools in Fort Mill — Gold Hill, Springfield, and Banks Trail, where he currently teaches. A fifth middle school, Pleasant Knoll, opened in 2017. Now, there are nearly 1,000 band students across the district’s five middle schools. 

Kirk is well-known and respected in Fort Mill as a resource for new band programs just getting started on their paths to success. He is also a sought-after drill writer for high school bands and color guard teams in South Carolina and beyond. Although he thrives on the energy of working with high school bands, he has never wanted to be a high school director.

     “Middle school is my niche. The kids get me, and I get them. It takes a special person, maybe a crazy person, to want to keep coming back to work with adolescents. Every day is a new adventure.”

Throughout their middle school years, Kirk’s students grow from shy, nervous, and anxious beginners into seasoned performers. Watching this progress is one of Kirk’s greatest joys as a teacher. “They are not just seasoned in accomplishments but in self-worth. They just grow up a bit. Their emotional intelligence is also growing. Hopefully, I give these kids a few nuggets of wisdom they’ll remember in the future.”

Kirk says he has also become more seasoned through the years. In the early days he sometimes lacked patience when a student didn’t pick up a skill quickly.  He has become a more reflective teacher and more likely to consider how he can reach children in the ways that are best for them to learn.

“I think about what I’m saying and doing that’s causing them to miss the mark. I ask myself how I can change my approach to help them achieve to a higher level or get a basic understanding of a concept in which they are struggling. I feel it’s my responsibility that the students truly understand the process, not just perform. If their understanding of the process is strong, then the product has a much better chance of being strong. The product — the show — will be fine no matter what if the students know you care and are there to help them.”

One of the greatest lessons he’s learned as a teacher is the importance of building a network of colleagues and sharing resources. “I don’t mind finding people to help me when I am not the expert my kids deserve. Percussion is my biggest weakness when it comes to teaching instruments, and I’m not a good flute player. So I have guest musicians who are experts on their instruments come in and work with my students almost routinely. I feel that individual and small group instruction is most effective in band, especially during the early years. I’d rather use the money we have in our band booster club budget to pay stipends for guest musicians to work with students than to buy stuff.” 

Band directors can be competitive and sometimes hold back their resources instead of sharing, but Kirk believes that practice is counterproductive. The focus, he says, must remain not on the competition and scores but on students and how best to help them learn and grow as musicians. 

“When I was young and stupid I hoarded those people who helped me instead of sharing them. I wanted to keep my resources as mine. It didn’t take me too many years to learn that the more I shared them, the more resources I got back. If I shared one, I might get back two or more. It’s not only smart to help each other, it’s the right thing to do.  In this job you’re an island in that often there is only one band director per school. If you don’t ask for help, it’s an almost impossible job to do.”

Another benefit of this give and take among band directors has been the growth of genuine friendships that Kirk now treasures. “I have a huge circle of wonderful people in my life that I wouldn’t have connected with if I hadn’t become open and willing to share. Giving a gift is way more fun than getting a gift, and this is that times 10.”

Each year, Kirk mentors Winthrop University music education interns. He especially enjoys working with his former students who return to his band room, now as teachers-in-training. “I feel an obligation to nurture them and not just give them an experience. Young teachers have got to find someone to help them. It’s a job that’s just too hard emotionally, cognitively, and physically unless you have support.”

Sometimes interns come to him with non-musical questions, such as how to fill out a purchase order or run the copier; but Kirk takes the time to explain or help them find the resources they need. “Sometimes in the beginning, just figuring out who to ask is the biggest question they have. The first thing I tell my interns is to reach out and find people in your school and build a network of your own. The relationships you form with your colleagues by talking to them in the hallway, office, or anywhere in the building are the relationships that you are going to need; and your colleagues are going to need you, too.”

It’s important for teachers to be willing to go the extra mile for each other, Kirk tells his interns. That means stepping up to help another teacher with plans, or covering another teacher’s duty, or just simply taking time to listen and get to know a person. “Start with smiling and being cordial. Say good morning when you pass someone in the hall, and mean it. You will have 1,000 things on your mind, but you have to make yourself emotionally available to say a warm hello. You don’t have to have a 15-minute conversation in the hallway every time to be nice to others. When you are in need, someone will be more apt to help you if you have been a genuine person than if you’ve been someone who never speaks to others and can’t be bothered.”

Kirk has watched the profession he loves change through the past three decades. South Carolina school districts that once had hundreds of applicants for teaching positions now struggle to fill openings, especially in high-poverty schools. “There really are 1,000 reasons to quit — the pay, the certification hoops we must jump through, the duties and responsibilities beyond the classroom that come with teaching. Those teachers who stay will usually say that for them teaching is a calling. For them, it’s about finding reasons to keep teaching and to make teaching enjoyable.”

To stay the course in education, teachers must feel a deep sense of passion and purpose, he says. They must know they are benefiting the children in their care and making things better in the world in some small way. “I couldn’t work with students or do anything musical as a career without it being a part of me, without it being something I’m passionate about doing and that makes a huge difference in my life. I’m sharing a part of me with them. Even if it’s just a routine thing, it’s part of my soul, and I hope they’ll appreciate and take at least a little part of that away to help them in their future lives.”

All teachers, whether novices or veterans, must find a balance between their work and personal lives, he said. That balance is critical to a teacher’s happiness and longevity. “If all you have is what you do from 9-5, then chances are you’re not going to be a happy person and probably won’t be doing this much longer. There has to be a diversion from your stress. We all carry concern for our students, deadlines, and anxieties about how we’re doing as teachers and all the hoops we have to jump through. If you don’t let that go, you’re going to be miserable.”

     Kirk looks forward to spending time with his husband, Keith and puppy, Graham each day after school.  “Keith is so supportive and totally understands the demands of my job.” Kirk has also taken up cooking, with Keith’s help.  “I have cooked some fantastic meals, and also had some misses along the way; but either way, it’s a great outlet to help me take my mind off the challenges of the day.”

Kirk admits there were times when he, too, considered walking away from teaching. Twenty years into his career, he began work on his master’s in administration with an eye toward becoming an assistant principal. After he completed his degree, he was asked to help open the Fort Mill School District’s third middle school. In the excitement of launching a new band program, Kirk “got a second wind” and decided to stay in the classroom. Later, helping open Banks Trail and starting its band program in 2011 invigorated him yet again.

Working with numerous principals throughout the years, Kirk has learned first-hand that a good leader is another critical piece of the teacher retention puzzle. “If you know you have the principal’s support — if you have a principal who has your back and that you can communicate with — you can work through all the issues and have the stamina to stay.” 

Kirk calls Banks Trail the best and most revitalizing part of his career. “It’s nice to end up at a school where the faculty is great, the kids are great, the environment is positive, the teachers are supportive of each other, and everyone pulls together to make the school run. It’s a great team feeling.”

Now in the twilight of his career, Kirk takes time near the end of each school year to consider whether he will continue. Having taught with Kirk at Banks Trail for five years, I can see it in his eyes when he’s thinking about his year and pondering his future. I recognize that look because, with 27 years of teaching under my belt, I, too, spend some time reflecting each April. A former band student myself, I enjoy sharing stories with Kirk. Some mornings I join him in his band room for coffee and conversation. 

“I ask myself sometimes if maybe it’s time to retire,” he told me one morning. “But then I always say, ‘I don’t think I’m quite done yet.’ I enjoy what I do. I’m teaching some of the best students with some of the best attitudes of my entire career. Almost every class period, they’ll say good-bye to me and thank me for teaching them. I have to pinch myself sometimes to remind myself that this isn’t a dream. When teaching starts to feel more like a chore than a joy, that’s when I’ll know it’s time.”

 In the process of moving to a new home, Kirk recently rediscovered a treasure his aunt made for him years ago — a cross-stitch of him seated at the piano in his living room back home in Virginia. That same piano now sits in Kirk’s own living room in Fort Mill. If he has a particularly stressful day at school, Kirk might sit at the piano and begin to play. In those moments when the music works its magic yet again, the stresses of the day melt away and Kirk remembers his purpose.

“I have an inherent drive to help students. There is a joy I find, a satisfaction really, in doing this every day. It’s the little moments you don’t plan for, the special moments where the children will bless your heart in the best and most wonderful ways when they say, ‘Mr. Godbey, you’re my favorite teacher.’ There have been a lot of those moments over these 34 years. It’s hard to say good-bye to that.”

The Other Side of the Door

“I close that classroom door, and I immediately count heads. I want to know that I have everyone accounted for — who’s going out and coming in. I look constantly at the windows and the door, making sure everything is safe….It’s ingrained in me.”

Gary Robb, Special Education Teacher

When Gary Robb strapped on his bullet-proof vest and .45 caliber handgun as a member of his police department’s SWAT team, he had no idea what he might face on the other side of a door. 

“It could be a down-on-your-luck guy who was having a bad day, or a three-striker who had already been to San Quentin and doesn’t care what happens next,” said Gary, who served for 10 years with the Burlingame, CA, Police Department near San Francisco.  “But if there was someone in an extremely high-risk situation that needed to be extracted or dealt with, you were paid to go through that door.”

These days, as he prepares for a new career as a special education teacher at Catawba Ridge High School in Fort Mill, Gary is strapping on a book bag instead of 25 pounds of police gear. It may not be as dangerous, but teaching is a little bit like being on a SWAT team, he says. Both require teamwork, patience, determination, and a calm demeanor. “You never know what might happen inside that classroom door,” he said. “But I’m ready to find out.”

A San Francisco Bay Area native now living with his family in Fort Mill, SC, Gary has completed his University of South Carolina’s Master of Arts in Teaching degree and is certified in special education. The program, which included a semester-long teaching internship, is attractive to students like Gary who are coming from other careers and life experiences. Because he earned a master’s degree, his pay will be higher than those who begin their teaching careers with bachelor’s degrees. In addition, Robb’s certification choice will put him in high demand. Nearly 20 percent of all vacant teaching positions reported at the beginning of the 2019-20 school year in South Carolina were in special education.

When he was not traveling the 80 miles between his Fort Mill home and USC’s Columbia campus for his courses, Gary worked as an instructional assistant and substitute teacher at Banks Trail Middle School, teaching everything from earth science to Shakespeare, even covering the front office telephones when called upon to help out. 

It is his life experiences that Gary draws from now as he prepares for his new career. Every day he sees parallels between his former work in law enforcement and the classrooms where he has subbed. Being a cop required patience and a calm demeanor in stressful times, Gary says. He learned early on that if he were to get excited and “amped up” while responding to a threat, he wouldn’t be able to think clearly. 

“If I stayed calm, I had a better chance of reacting well to a particular situation,” he said. “When you’re calm, you can pull from the tools and resources you’ve been trained to use.” Teachers must have the same kind of calm and patience, he said. 

“Your tone and delivery are very impactful,” Gary said. “In law enforcement, when you’re talking to a robbery victim, you have to have a caring tone and be compassionate. In a classroom setting, yelling and screaming isn’t going to help you with anything. Kids don’t respond to that. You have to stay positive, and you have to have two-way communication.”

For Gary, the brotherhood of police meant his colleagues were truly comrades, taking on each other’s paperwork, conducting interviews to help out a buddy, even covering shifts so that a colleague could have Christmas with his family for the first time in two years. 

Gary can already see that same kind of brotherhood among teachers. Daily he observes teachers covering duties for each other, sharing lesson plans, or taking on misbehaving students to help out a colleague. If a teacher calls in sick, it is not uncommon for teammates to create and deliver lesson plans to the sub so the teacher can concentrate on getting well. 

The best administrators in police departments, he said, are the ones who listen to their staff members, get to know them, and ask about their families and outside interests. They show their officers they care by being supportive, offering advice, and helping staff members get the training they need as they pursue their career goals. Gary says he can already see the same is true for the best school administrators. 

Teaching was not a career Gary ever considered while growing up in San Mateo County, CA. His first passion was baseball. He went to Canada Junior College in northern California on a baseball scholarship as a pitcher. One of his teammates was outfielder Moises Alou, who later played for 17 seasons in the National League. 

Looking back, Gary realizes that he had a servant’s heart early on. He spent many hours in his youth coaching younger baseball players and volunteering in his community as part of the Boy Scout program.  

A family friend who worked for the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Department, encouraged Gary to consider police work after college because of Gary’s volunteer spirit and interest in helping others. Gary went on a few ride-alongs with his friend and with other officers, and he talked to people he knew in law enforcement to see if the work would be a fit for him. 

Gary remembers riding along with a young police officer responding to a domestic violence situation and thinking, “You’re a 20-year-old, not married, no children, no mortgage, but you’re in the position of having to tell a 40-year-old who’s having an argument and hitting someone else what you’re supposed to do. Seeing that before I became a cop was eye opening,” Gary recounts. “I learned by watching others that police work is about solving other people’s problems continuously. But you don’t solve problems by giving orders, or escalating force. You solve problems with communication.” 

Gary’s law enforcement career began in 1994, when he was hired as a corrections officer for the San Mateo County Sheriff’s office. He oversaw more than 60 inmates in the county detention center and worked 12-18-hour shifts. He was later promoted to deputy sheriff and worked for the department for three years. 

Gary longed for a job doing police work on the streets, so he applied to the Burlingame Police Department, where in 1997 he was offered street work immediately. He calls the 10 years he worked in Burlingame “some of the best years of my life.”

     Along with SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics), his training in the aftermath of the Columbine High School shootings in 1999 and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks included breaching buildings, trains, and critical infrastructure as well as exercises in taking down active shooters.

 Gary doesn’t know how long he would have stayed with police work. In 2008, he was half way through with his master’s degree in public administration at the University of San Francisco and had goals of becoming a lieutenant or maybe going to law school later in his career. But all of that changed when he injured his back while helping load an 800-pound safe onto a forklift to take in as evidence following a robbery. Gary felt a twinge in his back while he and his fellow officers were lifting the safe, but he went about the work he was doing anyway. Over time, the twinge led to numbness in his leg. A spinal fusion was required, as well as eight months of recovery time at home. With his injury now a liability, Gary chose to retire from the police work he loved. 

Gary made the best of the situation, completing his master’s in public administration and going to work for Stanford University as project manager for compliance. His work included developing and coordinating a “tabletop exercise” for the new Stanford Stadium. In a series of simulations, local, state, and federal authorities worked through how to prepare for scenarios such as bomb scares at Stanford football games.  In addition, he conducted risk assessments and active shooter, workplace violence, and hazardous materials training exercises at Stanford. 

Later, as director of operations for Pinkerton Consulting and Investigations in San Francisco, he trained and supervised more than 70 investigators and support staff as well as negotiated and managed contracts for Fortune 500 clients.

His family decided to move to the Charlotte, NC, area in 2014 when he was hired as manager for global security risk management and investigations at NetApp. Two years later, his entire 50-member department was laid off. Gary took time to reflect and consider what his next career move would be. He knew he could reconnect with his contacts in California if he wanted to continue in corporate or even city government positions. But he didn’t want to uproot his family from the home and schools they’d grown to love in Fort Mill. 

While studying his resume, Gary realized that so much of his life’s work had been about giving back to others, whether that was protecting people or property, delivering a resource or tool that would make people safer, or helping others be more aware of situations and surroundings. 

“I could see a common theme in all of my work in law enforcement, the corporate world, and the university setting. I was training, mentoring, instructing, and coaching.”

Gary began to wonder if teaching might be his next calling.

“I gathered my circle of friends, ones who are truthful with each other and won’t just tell you what you want to hear but how they TRULY feel,” he said. “When I asked them what they thought about me becoming a teacher, they said, ‘Why didn’t you do this a long time ago?’”

Just as Gary made his decision to become a cop after riding along with a variety of police officers, he chose to try teaching on for size by taking up substitute work. 

Gary could tell right away he loved being in schools every day, but it was a two-month stint in an eighth-grade science class at Banks Trail Middle School in Fort Mill that sealed his decision to pursue education as his next career.

“Being there every day for weeks, I was always talking to and getting to know my students and building relationships with them so that they would be more engaged in my class,” Gary said. “Soon students would come up to me and tell me what they got on their exams in other classes or tell me how well they were doing in band or in their sports. Something about that resonated with me.”

After more than two years of working in classrooms at all grade levels at Banks Trail and completing his teaching internship at Catawba Ridge, Gary is recognized by students as someone who cares, someone who will talk to them and ask how they are doing — and he remembers what they tell him.  His relationships with students validate that teaching is a fit for him.

“The longer I’m in it, the more I can say with confidence that this is the profession I want to be involved with,” he said. “What better fit for the classroom could there be than a middle-aged male who has raised kids, who can provide support to students, and who can be a role model and even a father figure if needed to help these kids stay on the right track.”

Gary hopes to be a teacher who is an “outside the box thinker” and is dynamic, unique, and spontaneous – just as his students will be. 

Flexibility, communication, and problem-solving were all skills that made him successful in law enforcement and later in his project management work with Stanford University and several corporations. But most important, he said, was his heart for serving others.

“For me, it was not about driving a police car, or carrying a gun, or arresting people like you see on TV. For me, it was a bigger picture. The majority of us sworn officers are caring, compassionate, driven, Type-A personalities, but we are there to help and assist.”

Gary hopes that same care and compassion will serve him well in the classroom. He’d like to help his students learn problem-solving and communication skills so that they can handle crises when they arise and face them with calmness and confidence. But they cannot learn this from him, he says, if they do not see him as a role model. 

“You have to model the behavior you want kids to learn, show them the right way to do something. Kids are looking at you. They’re watching you, your actions and your words, even if they’re not looking directly at you. They’re looking at how you display yourself, picking up signals. You have to be that example and be at your best always.”

It was sometimes overwhelming to balance being a husband and father, baseball coach, and substitute teacher with his teacher training coursework, Gary says. After staying up late studying, it was up at 4 a.m. for Robb. He got a jump start on upcoming assignments and helped prepare his kids’ school lunches.  As he headed to work before 7 a.m., he passed the baton to his wife. On mornings like this, “It was like saying, ‘Tag, you’re it!’ to my wife as I headed out the door.”

And sleep? There hasn’t been much time for that. But sleep can wait, he says.

“The first steps on any new path aren’t easy, and I’ve never taken the easy path in my life.” 

Gary found his education classes enlightening – especially the introduction to teaching exceptional children class, which was one of his first. He believes all children can learn and grow and unlock their potential if they have access to the right resources and strategies. But most important of all to a student’s success, he says, is a caring teacher who understands his or her students.

“From baseball, working as an instructional assistant, subbing, and being a father, I’ve learned that you need to keep kids active. You need to have lesson plans that are on point – no break in the action! They’ll try to go off and push the limits. That’s what all kids do. But I’m supposed to corral them into the right direction. They don’t have to agree with me, but they need to have a voice. That adds value to the classroom.”

As a teacher, Gary will make only a fraction of the salary he earned in the corporate world. But he says you can’t put a price tag on the gift of time he’ll have with his family, especially at Christmas — a holiday he almost always worked as a cop. He looks forward to the beginning of the 2020-21 school year, when he will walk through his own classroom door to begin the career that has become his calling. But when the first bell rings and students file into his classroom, Gary knows he will instinctively feel the part of him that will always be a cop.

“I know I will close that classroom door and immediately count heads. I want to know that I have everyone accounted for, and who’s going out and coming in. I’m sure I’ll keep an eye on the windows and the door, making sure everything is safe,” he said.

The teachers outside on duty with Robb can count on knowing that he will be the last one inside the building.

“I always find myself standing on the far end of the yard somewhere,” he said. “I will make sure every student goes in first, and every teacher. It’s ingrained in me.”

Choices

“I didn’t want to leave my students. They had had people leave them all their lives – moms, dads, and teachers. I knew I spent more time with them than their parents, and they had already been through enough abandonment in their lives. I decided I was going to stay.”

Jennifer Abendano

Jennifer with husband Jonny, daughter Luna, and son Lucas

On any given afternoon, Jennifer Abendano is one of the last teachers to leave Banks Trail Middle School. She will stay late to grade papers, answer parent emails, write lesson plans, and prepare for the next school day. She will likely run copies not only for herself but also for her 7^th grade language arts teammates. 

 For her drive home to Charlotte, NC, from school in Fort Mill, SC, Jennifer usually tunes in a country music station on her car radio. That’s what she was doing the afternoon she heard Tim McGraw’s song “Humble and Kind” for the first time.

“At first it was the music that I noticed,” Jennifer recalls. “I have to like the music before I like a song. I thought it was pretty; so, the second time I heard it, I really listened to the lyrics. That’s when I knew it was not only beautiful musically, but the message is also beautiful.”

A teacher’s mind never stops planning the next lesson, so Jennifer started thinking of how she could use the song in her language arts classroom. Sometime later, an idea came to her. “My kids had a hard time identifying theme in a text, but they loved music. So, I thought I could combine teaching a skill they needed with something they’d enjoy.”

The first time she played the song for her students, she projected the lyrics on the SMART board and annotated beside each line what the words brought to her mind. The students annotated their thoughts during a second playing of the song, and through their discussions in small groups, they decided on the song’s theme. Pretty soon, the tune became a favorite of her homeroom, “even though almost none of them listened to country music before they heard that song,” Jennifer laughs. “We listened to it so many times that they all knew the lyrics by heart. They would request it almost daily, and it sort of became our class song.”

“Humble and Kind” helped her students develop an important reading skill, but it also gave them insight into the heart of their teacher. “They asked me which lines of the song mean the most to me, and I had to say that one is the line about grudges. I told them I have a hard time not holding grudges if someone I’m close to does me wrong.” she said. “If they apologize and we talk it out, it’s o.k.; but if there’s no closure, I have a hard time moving on. The line, ‘Bitterness keeps you from flying’ really is true.”

Jennifer was the first teacher to invite me into her classroom to work with her students when I took on my role as literacy specialist at Banks Trail Middle. Hers is a classroom where students gather during lunch for tutoring or just to talk to her. She is the teacher many of her students want on their teams for the annual faculty-student dodgeball tournaments. She says the seven years she’s spent at Banks Trail have been the fastest of her 12-year teaching career, for she loves working with adolescents in “the perfect storm” that is middle school. 

Bitter is not a word I ever associate with Jennifer, but it would have been easy for her to feel that way about her first five years of teaching. Thinking back to those days may bring tears to her eyes even now, years after she left her first school – an elementary school in east Charlotte.

 The first five years are considered the most crucial for teacher retention. It is during these years that many teachers – especially those in high-poverty school districts — walk away from the profession for good. In South Carolina where Jennifer teaches, 36 percent of the teachers who left their jobs at the end of the 2018-19 school year were in their first five years of teaching. Furthermore, 28 percent of first-year teachers hired for the 2018-19 school year did not return to their teaching positions the following year (CERRA, 2020).

Supportive administrators can make all the difference for novice teachers in their decisions to stay or go; but instead of encouraging, administrators at Jennifer’s first school created stress and anxiety with their focus on accountability and test scores. Evaluative observations and post-conferences, conducted at least three times a year, were not opportunities for teachers to receive feedback and constructive advice on how to improve instruction, she said. They were instead more like “gotcha” sessions, where administrators seemed intent only on criticizing and rarely praised what went well during a lesson.

“If one kid was off task, they wanted to ding me on that,” Jennifer said. “Our school had at least an 86 percent poverty rate. I’m trying to teach fractions to fourth graders for 50 minutes from a scripted book, and most of my 25 kids were worried about how they were going to get dinner that night. They were focused on survival. These kids may or may not have a home to go to at night.”

During the third week of her first year of teaching, the school’s math facilitator came to observe Jennifer. “She called me into her office afterwards and said I was doing so horribly that I would be lucky to have a job after Christmas,” Jennifer remembers. “I had only been teaching for three weeks! It’s absolutely insane to me now, looking back. But at the time I was so young and so weak I could only hear how terrible I was. It wasn’t registering to me then that I shouldn’t be amazing after just three weeks of teaching, and the math facilitator should have been offering suggestions that would help me. When you think you are terrible, you become completely discouraged.”

The conference with her math facilitator happened on a Friday afternoon after school. Jennifer went home to her apartment and spent that evening crying in the dark.

While Jennifer’s school-assigned mentor was encouraging and helpful, she was not teaching in Jennifer’s grade level. Rarely was there time for Jennifer to meet with her mentor to get help with planning or the many other teacher responsibilities she was learning to juggle.

Balancing work with any kind of life outside of school seemed almost impossible, Jennifer recalls. She and her teammates worked an average of 80 hours a week, arriving at school around 6:00 a.m. most days to prepare and teach the fourth graders in their care. Pizza deliveries and planning sessions that ran until 9:00 p.m. or later were common at least twice a week at her school, where elementary teachers must plan for teaching all four core subjects – language arts, math, science, and social studies. The 45 minutes teachers had during the school day for planning were taken up with meetings four out of five days a week, so planning before and after school was a must. Jennifer found that Sundays were also needed to keep up with her workload; so, she and her roommate, who was also a teacher, often spent all day Sunday preparing lessons, making baggies of manipulatives for students to use in math lessons, and grading papers. 

In addition to lesson plans, mounds of paperwork known as personalized education plans were required for each student working below grade level. In her school, that was the majority of the school’s population, which included many students who were new to the United States and were English language learners. This paperwork was in addition to the individualized education plans (IEPs) Jennifer was required to help write for her special needs students. 

“I was working as hard as I possibly could, and it never felt like enough,” she said. “At my school, it was not unusual for 8-10 teachers to leave each year by Thanksgiving break.”

Jennifer’s heart was heavy. She had dreamed of being a teacher ever since she was a little girl. As a child growing up in Grandville, Michigan, Jennifer loved going to school so much that her mother had to force her to stay home when she was sick. “I was a kid who would fake being well instead of fake being sick,” she remembers. “I just loved school and didn’t want to miss a day.”

Jennifer as a fourth grader with her brothers James (middle) and John (JJ)

One teacher stood out in her memory. Her fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Wilson, read to the class each day while seated in her rocking chair with her students gathered around her on the floor. Jennifer remembers her as a kind and caring teacher whom the children loved. She seemed to make the books’ characters come to life for her students as she read to them during story time. It was Mrs. Wilson who sealed Jennifer’s decision that teaching fourth grade would be her dream job someday. 

Jennifer attended Michigan State University’s College of Education, studying teaching for four years and then completing a year-long student teaching internship. At her graduation ceremony in 2007, the guest speaker warned that 50 percent of the newly-graduated teachers would likely quit teaching by the end of their fifth year. Jennifer did not want to become one of them.

She chose to substitute teach in Michigan for a year after graduation so she could be sure she had a variety of teaching experiences in all grades from kindergarten through high school before taking her first job. She worked as a substitute while also holding down part-time jobs as a bartender and waitress at local restaurants and serving drinks from the beverage cart at the golf course. All the while, she dreamed of one day having her own classroom where she could form bonds with her students in a way she couldn’t as a substitute teacher, and where she could create her own lesson plans instead of teaching from someone else’s. 

Though her first classroom was actually going to be a portable and not one inside the main building, Jennifer had been thrilled when she was hired to teach fourth grade in Charlotte for the 2008-2009 school year. An economic recession had meant layoffs in many Michigan school districts, and teaching jobs were scarce there. Charlotte’s school system had recruited her during her senior year, and Jennifer was ready to make her teaching dreams come true. Even though she became only the second person in her family to ever leave her home state, she made the move from Michigan to North Carolina, joining her college roommate who had also moved to Charlotte. 

Jennifer’s students were challenging, but they were truly what kept her going her first year. She loved when they gathered around her chair for read-aloud time, just as she had done in Mrs. Wilson’s classroom years ago. She was the only Caucasian in her classroom her first year, as most of her students were African American and Hispanic. Many of them lacked support at home and depended on her for the encouragement they needed to succeed in school. “These kids were not getting help with school work at home, and most of them had parents who worked multiple jobs,” she said. “If I wasn’t teaching my kids, they weren’t learning it anywhere else.”

The children were very different from the white middle class suburban neighborhood children she had grown up with in Michigan, but Jennifer loved their personalities and appreciated their diversity. “I learned so much from my kids,” she said. “They had different perspectives from anything I’d experienced, and they seemed to appreciate things that I took for granted at that age.”

End-of-year testing was extremely important in her Charlotte school, where administrators set a goal that 60 percent of all students must pass their reading and 80 percent must pass their math end-of-course tests with a minimum score of 3 out of a possible 4 points. For the students in this high- poverty school, earning a score of 3 was a difficult task, but Jennifer’s students met the goal.

At the after-testing field day event, Jennifer purchased a snow cone for one student who scored a 4 on both her reading and math tests. Jennifer has never forgotten the look on the student’s face when she handed the child that snow cone. “It was like I had bought her a really expensive fancy thing,” she said. “The way her face lit up was like I had just given her the world.” Jennifer also bought tickets and took her students to Charlotte’s Carowinds theme park if they scored 4 on either their math or reading end-of-course tests. Each year she had at least five students earn the trip. 

As the years passed, administrators still made their evaluation post-conferences “90 percent about what you were doing wrong and 10 percent about what went right in a lesson,” Jennifer said. But her colleagues took note of Jennifer’s remarkable success with getting passing scores out of struggling students and her passion for her life’s calling.  In her fourth and fifth years of teaching, she was nominated by her fellow teachers for the school’s teacher of the year award; and in her fifth year, she placed as runner-up. 

Jennifer became a go-to person for other teachers needing help with best teaching strategies, especially in reading. When she and her teammates met for their weekly marathon planning sessions, each teacher took a subject to plan and shared their work with the other teachers in the group. Jennifer’s plans for language arts were detailed and custom-designed in a workshop model with learning stations for students to practice the reading skills they needed at their level.

But by the end of her 5^th year of teaching, the stresses were taking their toll. Every Sunday night she experienced what she called “Sunday night depression” as she anxiously awaited Monday morning and the return to her classroom. She began to wonder how she would ever balance her work with a family. She had met Jonny Abendano, her future husband, and hoped they would one day have children. “I wanted to stay in teaching, but I knew that I could not do it for one more year at this school,” she said. 

It wasn’t about the money, though she recalls it was difficult to budget when teachers at her school received only 10 paychecks a year. She worked hard to save each month so she could make the final paycheck of the school year last through the summer. It wasn’t about the students, either. “Yes, the kids were challenging, but I connect most with kids who are struggling. They’re the ones who need me, and I need them. They’re the ones who make the job so meaningful.” 

At the end of the day, it was the lack of administrative support at her school that made her job unbearable. “I did all of this work and felt strung out all the time, and it was never enough,” she said. “I was still underappreciated by the administration of my school. All of us were underappreciated. Who you work for makes all the difference in education. We think it’s the kids we work for, but really I think it’s most important to have administrators who support you – administrators who trust you to plan that lesson and who believe in you.”

Jennifer scoured websites and advertisements for jobs and applied for four — one at a middle school in her Charlotte district, two in neighboring school districts, and one – a human resources job — at The Westin Hotel in uptown Charlotte. Her interview at the Westin was in April, and the company’s representative asked if she could start immediately. Jonny encouraged her to take the job and get away from the school and all its stresses. 

“But I didn’t want to leave my students,” Jennifer said. “They had had people leave them all their lives – moms, dads, and teachers. I knew I spent more time with them than their parents, and they had already been through enough abandonment in their lives. I decided I was going to stay and stick it out until the end of the year.”

Her interview at Banks Trail in Fort Mill came near the end of the school year in May. She was hired to teach 6^th grade language arts but was assigned just before school started to teach 7^th grade instead. At Banks Trail, Jennifer has found her longed-for teaching home. Though she thought she would always want to teach elementary school, she has found that middle schoolers, particularly 7^th graders, are “the perfect combination of kid and teenager.”

“They are not too cool for hugs or to give you a compliment,” she said. “They are still kids, but they are more independent learners. The middle school years are the hardest in a kid’s life. They are struggling to find their identity, who they are, and what they truly want.” 

Some days she still feels overwhelmed with all the responsibilities that come with teaching her four language arts classes, being grade-level chairperson, and helping coach the academic quiz teams. But she has found what she calls “the work-life balance” she always wanted. “It doesn’t feel like it’s been seven years here,” she said. “There’s still stress, but it’s manageable stress.”

No longer is she plagued with Sunday night depression. Teaching only one subject – the one she is most passionate about – means Jennifer doesn’t feel like she’s drowning with four subjects to plan each week. She has supportive colleagues who meet with her weekly and share ideas, and she says her administrators hold back on meetings so that teachers can plan instruction for their students. Instead of something to dread, teacher evaluation time at her school is a time for celebrating her students’ successes, she said. 

“The administrators here focus on what has gone well and have been so focused on the positives through the years that I have had to drag the negatives out of my administrators at my conferences.” She most appreciates that her administration trusts her judgement as a professional to do what is in the best interest of her students. That alone is worth her nearly 80-minute round trip commute each day.

Jennifer will soon begin her 13^th year of teaching. Despite the uncertainties created by the COVID-19 pandemic — including multiple district calendar changes and an ever-evolving school reopening plan — she is looking forward to meeting her new students and is already planning the writing activity she will do with them the first week of school. Instead of the anxiety she once felt about returning to teaching after the summer in the early years of her career, she finds herself filled with hope and excitement. 

When she returns to her classroom on August 24, Jennifer will unpack years of treasured mementoes from her former students. One is a plague given to her two years ago by one of her homeroom students, Myles Ehrenberg. Inspired by the “Humble and Kind” lesson, Myles went home and asked his mother if she would find someone to make a gift that features words from the song for his favorite teacher. Not only had he enjoyed Jennifer’s language arts class that year, Myles had also signed up to be in her reading club twice.

“Mrs. Abendano is really nice and she’s chill,” Myles said. “She really understands kids, she’s relatable, and she’s really funny. She tutored me even with math, and that definitely helped me out. She’s one of the best teachers I’ve ever had by far.”

The words “Always Stay Humble and Kind” seemed perfect for a plaque for Mrs. Abendano, he said, because they really fit who she is. “Mrs. Abendano doesn’t expect her students to just know things” and takes the time to explain, he said. He thinks it’s because she remembers what it was like to work hard in language arts class when she was in school. “She enjoys her job very much,” Myles said. “She loves kids, and it shows.”

For Jennifer, the wooden plaque with purple and gray lettering is more than just a cool gift featuring her school’s colors and words from her favorite song. It symbolizes the joy she still finds in working with students who need her and in answering her life’s calling.

Never once did she regret not taking the Westin Hotel job, Jennifer says, and she is not bitter that her first years of teaching were harder than she ever could have imagined. Instead, every day she is thankful she chose to stay in the classroom. When her adolescent students share with her their struggles with confidence, she is reminded of the math facilitator’s words from long ago and the night she spent crying in the dark. 

“I tell my student to stay strong and not bend to pressure from others,” she said. “Be yourself and stand firm in your beliefs.”

Jennifer says she has now the best of all worlds – teaching and being with her family – two of her greatest loves. She and Jonny welcomed daughter Luna in December 2016. Their second child, son Lucas, was born in spring March 2019. Jennifer wants her children to grow up seeing their mother as a hard worker who also takes time for her family.

 “It’s important for Luna to know she doesn’t have to choose one or the other. As a teacher, you can have it all if you set your mind to it and find the environment that’s right for you. It’s the perfect job for being a mother because you can work and follow your passion and have that sense of accomplishment. But for almost two months out of the year, you get to be a stay-at-home mom.”

It is a warm summer day, and Jennifer and Luna are at home finishing breakfast. The song “Humble and Kind” comes on the radio in their living room, and Luna reaches for Jennifer’s hand to coax her mother to dance. “Don’t take for granted the love this life gives you,” Tim McGraw sings. “When you get where you’re going, don’t forget, turn back around. Help the next one in line, always stay humble and kind….”

“When she was a baby and that song would come on, I’d always hold Luna and sing to her and dance with her in my arms,” Jennifer said. “When it comes on now, she knows it. She knows that’s our song.”

References
Center for Educator Recruitment, Retention, and Advancement (CERRA). 2020. South Carolina Annual Educator Supply & Demand Report. https://www.cerra.org/uploads/1/7/6/8/17684955/2019-20_supply_demand_report.pdf

Journeys

“I know God had a plan for me when he put me on that bus.”

Dr. Antwon Sutton

In the cool of early morning, children waited for their school bus at three stops along the road that winds through the Boyd Hill community in Rock Hill, SC. As the bus arrived, the driver swung open the doors for them as they formed a line at the bottom of the stairs. The children looked up at their driver’s smile and waited for their turn to enter. 

“Good morning Mr. Antwon!” each said, and each received a greeting in return from the driver who knew each one by name and asked about their families — the driver who would often loop back through the community to pick up stray students who woke up late and missed the bus. 

Antwon Sutton had the usual rules for his bus: No talking until the bus pulls away from the school grounds, no yelling, no profanity, and leave no trash on the bus. But he also had a few other expectations: You can’t get on the bus without first greeting the driver. You must show the driver your interim progress and report cards on the days they are issued, and you must work hard in school and make academic gains.

Fist bumps and congratulations awaited the students as they presented their reports to Antwon each quarter. “I knew you could do it!” he would say to a student whose science grade had risen from an F to a C. “You need to pull these up!” he told the one whose grades had slipped since last quarter. 

When Antwon took over their bus route in January 1999, the children of Boyd Hill had been through a series of drivers who started but quickly quit the job. Route 33 – the Boyd Hill route – was known for its issues, which often included fights among riders. 

Antwon was 19 years old and not much older or bigger than the high school students who boarded his bus each day, but he was used to hard work and not afraid of a challenge. He had worked two jobs in high school while taking advanced placement courses, served as student body and honor society president, and led the band as drum major. He was now a freshman at Winthrop University in Rock Hill and driving a school bus to help put himself through college. 

Antwon needed the money to supplement his scholarships and student loans, plus he wanted to save for a car. For Antwon, the job as bus driver was ideal. He was able to work his morning and afternoon bus schedules around his Winthrop classes. 

Almost immediately after he took over Route 33, his riders tested him. When rocks whizzed through the bus and landed near the stairs at the door one afternoon, Antwon turned the bus around and radioed the school administrator that he was on his way back. It didn’t take long for the offenders’ identities to be revealed when the administrator threatened to make all the students call their families to come pick them up at school. 

“That’s when everybody started calling out the names of who did it, and we got them off the bus,” Antwon said. “I told them ‘I am here to see that you get to and from school safely.’ They saw I wasn’t playing, and I wasn’t going to drive with them acting like that.”

Each day, Antwon asked his riders about their school work and told them about his courses at Winthrop, where he was majoring in business administration. When his riders invited him to attend their athletic events, he went to cheer them on. On some afternoons after his route was complete, he showed up at their neighborhood community center to attend their Boys’ and Girls’ Club events or tutor them in their school work. 

He became their mentor, encouraging them to dream beyond the boundaries of their neighborhood and set goals for the future. He told them about his hometown of McClellanville, SC, where his parents and brothers lived, and he shared about his own high school days working after school at the Bi-Lo grocery store and Taco Bell. Education was important to his family, and college was expected, he told them. So, when his grades slipped, the after-school jobs had to go. He told them of his maternal grandmother’s work as a nurse and his mother’s job as a mental health specialist, and how both had inspired his dreams of becoming a hospital administrator.

Each morning and afternoon, Antwon showed up behind the steering wheel of their bus. Each day he sent riders back to their apartments to convince their siblings they needed to get on the bus and not skip school as planned. Instead of problem students, Antwon had riders whose behaviors were changing.

“They behaved differently because they knew someone cared about them,” Antwon said. “They were kids whose parents both worked or who came from single-parent homes. They needed someone to hold them accountable.”

If he ever had to miss a day of driving due to his Winthrop schedule, Antwon would prepare his riders and leave them with his words to remember. “I told the kids they were a reflection of me,” he said. “If you misbehave when I’m not here, you’ll make me look bad.” The substitute drivers would report no problems when he returned. Instead, they told stories of riders correcting each other if they started to misbehave, saying things like, “You know Mr. Antwon doesn’t let us do that!”

In the summer after his junior year of college, Antwon had two internships lined up, one at a hospital near Charleston and another later in the summer at a bank’s loan center in Charlotte. Those weeks he spent immersed in the business world would be a turning point in his life.

“I had been raised to help people,” Antwon said. “That’s what I am used to, and I don’t know anything different. It kept playing in my head each day, ‘What can I do to be of service to others?’ I thought being a hospital administrator would be a way to do that.”

But that summer, Antwon saw that his work in the corporate world wouldn’t be as much about helping people as it would be about the bottom line. 

“Meeting sales goals and fattening the pockets of companies — that’s not enough to move me,” he said. “I needed to be somewhere where I could be happy and help others. The money I would make would be great, but my mind kept going back to my kids on my bus.”

By this time, Antwon had been driving the school bus for three years and had watched some of his riders grow up. Students who were once looking for a fight were now focusing on their schoolwork and athletics, attending school regularly, and setting goals for after graduation.

“I thought about how their faces lit up when they got on my bus or saw me at their games, and it stuck with me. I thought if I’m having this kind of impact on kids as a bus driver, what kind of influence could I have if I became a teacher?”

The children whose lives he influenced had in turn changed his. Instead of leading a corporation, leading a classroom became Antwon’s dream.

Antwon graduated from Winthrop in 2002 with his bachelor’s degree in business and then re-enrolled, this time in Winthrop’s College of Education to pursue a master’s degree in teaching. He continued to drive the Boyd Hill bus route and other routes in Rock Hill while he earned his master’s degree, and he continued to mentor his riders at the Boyd Hill and Emmett Scott community centers. 

Each morning after running his route, he parked his bus at Old Pointe Elementary School and worked there as a fourth-grade math and reading interventionist. The students loved seeing their driver come off the bus and into their school to teach them. The teachers saw the progress their students were making under Antwon’s care, so they often invited him to co-teach alongside them in their classrooms. 

Upon graduating with his master’s in teaching in 2004, he hoped to be hired at Rock Hill High School, where his riders were zoned to attend. After six years of driving their bus, he wanted to keep an eye on them and continue his work as their mentor. But the job offer came instead from Clover High School in nearby Clover, SC., where he was hired to teach business, economics, and integrated business applications courses. 

I was working as a fifth-grade teacher at an elementary school in Clover at that time. Though our paths never crossed, I often heard from former students about how they loved Antwon’s class at Clover High. He was known as a teacher whose class was so engaging that students didn’t want to leave when the bell rang, a teacher who spent time getting to know his students and who mentored them even after they left his class. 

Antwon’s students and fellow teachers celebrated his accomplishments through the years, which included being named Clover High’s Teacher of the Year in 2007, earning his administrative certification, and becoming an assistant principal at the school – all in the same year.  He worked as an assistant principal at Clover High for three years, earning his doctorate in educational leadership in 2009.

For the 2010-2011 school year, Antwon worked as an assistant principal at Clover Middle. At the end of that year, Antwon had a total of four years of secondary educational leadership experience and felt ready to lead his own school. He left Clover to take his first principalship at Sedgefield Middle School in Goose Creek, SC. 

I lost track of Antwon for a while. Though I knew him as an exceptional teacher and leader, I never knew the story of how driving a school bus led him to the classroom.  I didn’t know that his work at Sedgefield Middle honed his leadership skills and prepared him for Alcorn Middle School in Columbia, SC, where as principal he took the school from the state’s persistently failing list to Palmetto State Silver Award winner in just two years. I didn’t know that through all the years since leaving Clover he had continued to mentor his former Clover High students, helping one to go to Winthrop to become a teacher and inspiring many others to pursue their dreams in the business world. 

It wasn’t until 2016 when I, too, had left Clover and was working in my second year as a literacy specialist at Banks Trail Middle School in Fort Mill, SC, that our paths finally crossed. I was helping organize our school’s first-ever Read Across America Day event and looking through the list of district administrators to make sure all had been invited. One name immediately caught my eye — Dr. Antwon Sutton, the Fort Mill School District’s new director of student services.

Dr. Sutton arrived at our school on the day of our event, book in hand and a smile on his face, ready to read to a class of 6^th graders. I introduced myself, and we started sharing Clover stories. It was then I first heard the story of his days as a school bus driver.

Dr. Sutton went on to become Fort Mill’s executive director of student services, a role that included overseeing the district’s bus transportation department. And on July 1, 2020, he will become the new superintendent of the Chester County (SC) School District.

Not a day goes by that he doesn’t remember driving the Boyd Hill route and the students on his bus who changed his life – the students he still sees occasionally in Rock Hill and who still call him by name. Becoming a teacher and now a district administrator wasn’t the path he set out on as a Winthrop College student all those years ago. But Dr. Sutton has found fulfilment in a calling to serve others — a calling that has rewards not measured by worldly standards. 

For him, the rewards come in unexpected emails from former students who take time to thank him for inspiring them. They come in invitations to return as a guest speaker at Alcorn Middle, where he is greeted with hugs and fist bumps from the students. In his words to them, he urges students to “rise up and pursue their dreams, to become better and more powerful than the day before.”

“You can change anything in your life if you want to badly enough,” he tells them. “I am a living witness that your dreams can come true with hard work and determination. Remember, all things are possible for those who believe.” 

Dr. Sutton has seen his territory of service expand through the years, from classroom to school to district-level responsibilities. He hears daily of the struggles teachers face with discipline issues, paperwork, and evaluation systems that prioritize testing over creativity and suck the joy out of teaching. He knows teachers who are parents and who struggle to make ends meet on salaries that qualify them for government assistance. Some have told him they think often of leaving the profession to search for better pay.

It’s at these times that he shares his faith and his story, and he encourages teachers to stay the course — even if that means taking on side jobs to pay the bills. All children, but especially those in high-poverty schools, need the stability that comes from having a teacher who shows up for them each day – a teacher who believes students are more than the end-of-year test scores paint them to be. Teachers who remain as “troops on the ground and in the trenches” are securing not just their students’ future successes, but also our country’s.

“We are preparing the children who are going to take care of us someday,” he said. “We go into education to make an impact on lives. The successes of our students will trickle down and create our society’s success.”

Most importantly, children need teachers — and teachers need leaders — who they can count on to support them, listen to them, and believe in them, he said. Listening to his teachers and students helped Dr. Sutton transform the schools he led. Showing up for his riders every day helped him transform Bus Route 33. 

Every teacher has memories that he or she treasures for a lifetime. Dr. Sutton has never forgotten the day he told his middle school riders that he wouldn’t be driving them next year, as it was time to start his teaching career. He had driven some of them to and from school for six years, and while they knew this day would come, they were still shocked and sad. 

Their first words were not congratulations, but “Who’s going to drive us? Who’s going to drive our bus?” And on the very last day of school, even though they were finished with final exams and hadn’t ridden the bus that morning, his high school riders were standing at the Boyd Hill bus stop that afternoon, waiting for him. 

“I know it was their way of saying goodbye,” he said. “They didn’t say anything. They were just there to see me pull up to that bus stop for the last time.”

Now as he prepares to lead the Chester County School District, Dr. Sutton remembers the children of Boyd Hill and hopes that others will choose to answer the calling to teach as he did. He knows the struggles of teaching are real. As he told the students at Alcorn Middle, “You may have to sacrifice something. You may be worried about the amount of work and effort you’ll have to put into it. You may wonder if it will be worth it. There will be roadblocks. I’ve had them, everybody’s had them. But obstacles don’t have to stop you. If you run into a wall, don’t turn around and give up. Figure out how to climb it.”

Each morning, Dr. Sutton says a prayer to begin his day. It is the same prayer he said as a boy growing up in McClellanville and as a college student rising in the cool of early morning to begin his bus route.

“Now I wake to see the light. ‘Tis God has kept me through the night. To him I lift my voice in prayer. ‘Tis he who’ll keep me through this day.”

 “I’m a spiritual person,” he says. “I know God had a plan for me when he put me on that bus.”

A Culture of Kindness

“We’re not going to be able to recruit ourselves out of this teacher shortage. Statistically it’s not possible to fill the gaps. Keep them there, support them, value them, respect them — and maybe they’ll stay.”

Dr. Jennifer Garrett, S. C. Center for Educator Recruitment, Retention, and Advancement

When Dr. Jennifer Garrett walks into a meeting of South Carolina’s legislators and educational leaders, she feels the room holds its breath. As coordinator for research and program evaluation for the S.C. Center for Educator Recruitment, Retention, and Advancement (CERRA), Dr. Garrett compiles the state’s annual teacher supply and demand report.  Though there have been some small improvements, the numbers tell the story: South Carolina’s teacher shortage is critical.

“I sometimes think people dread seeing me come into the room for a meeting after we release our annual report,” she said. “I feel like all I do is deliver bad news.”

For Dr. Garrett, one data point is most sobering: college students are not as inclined as they once were to choose education as a major. There were 1,752 South Carolina students who graduated with a Bachelor’s degree and teacher certification eligibility in 2019; and though this total is up 79 graduates from the previous academic year, it is the first annual increase since 2013-14 (CERRA, 2020).

Meanwhile, South Carolina continues its struggle with teacher retention. Each year since 2011-12, the number of departures among S.C. teachers has grown anywhere from 1% to 21%, averaging an annual increase of 8%. During or at the end of the 2017-18 school year, 7,300 South Carolina teachers left their positions. Dr. Garrett is encouraged that the number dropped to 6,650 at the end of the 2018-19 school year — a 9 percent decrease. The ending of the S.C. Teacher and Employee Retention Incentive (TERI) led to an exodus of teachers in 2018, and significantly fewer teacher retirements in 2019 helps to explain the decrease in classroom vacancies. 

Still, Dr. Garrett finds it concerning that of the teachers who left their positions last year, 36 percent had five or fewer years of experience. The data also shows that of all first-year teachers hired for the 2018-19 school year, 28 percent did not return to a teaching position in the same district the following year (CERRA, 2020). 

“Just 12 years ago, when the 2008 economic recession hit South Carolina and school districts had to slash their budgets, teachers couldn’t find jobs. Now, we have gone from having an excess supply of teachers to having such a high demand and not enough teachers. It’s been a complete 180-degree turn,” she said. “The number of teachers who leave the classroom each year remains extremely high. For that and many other reasons, continued support for educators and their profession is essential in this state.”

Critical need subject areas used to be limited to special education, math, and science. Special education still accounts for 20 percent of the openings in South Carolina’s schools and is the subject area most likely to have vacancies after school starts. However, shortages can now be found across almost all subject areas, including elementary school teaching.

Rural areas of South Carolina’s Pee Dee Region, which have often had the greatest issues with teacher recruitment and retention, aren’t the only ones struggling.

“There are districts experiencing problems with teacher shortages that never struggled in the past,” she said. “Districts dealing with poverty and lack of resources used to be the only ones with substantial problems. Now it’s the Lowcountry, the Midlands, the Savannah River Valley — it’s everywhere. Honestly, schools just need teachers. Period.”

In 2019, South Carolina raised its minimum teacher salary to $35,000 in an effort to help raise the state’s average teacher salary and make it more competitive. Yet as she researches data from exit interviews, Dr. Garrett finds that salary is almost never the sole reason why teachers are leaving. 

“Most often, problems related to school culture and working conditions rank as the top reasons why teachers leave a school. Administrators have the greatest power to impact teacher retention. It doesn’t have to cost anything to create a culture of kindness.”

The principal sets the tone for the culture of a school, she said. Creating a climate of respect, collegiality, appreciation, professional learning, and support is a good place to start.

“Why wouldn’t you want to work harder to keep experienced teachers? The experienced teachers are willing to do the work, they’re embedded in their communities, and they hold stock in their schools. Why wouldn’t you do everything in your power to keep them?”

Dr. Garrett has had opportunities to talk with groups of teachers as part of her research. A recurring theme in those conversations is that teachers want leaders who listen, who inspire, and who create a school culture where teachers thrive. The way the school leader interacts with his or her staff — which must include consistent communication and support — can make all the difference in whether educators choose to stay or leave a school.

“Teachers want to be treated with kindness and respect. They want to be asked for their feedback before school-wide changes are made. They want a voice in decision-making about new initiatives that impact students and classroom instruction. They want the administration to have the teacher’s back and be the teacher’s advocate when dealing with classroom discipline issues and parent complaints. We always knew the importance of leadership in teacher retention, but to hear it from the teachers themselves is truly powerful.”

While all teachers need to feel valued, first-year teachers are most in need of support. Mentoring is crucial for first-year teachers, but the support they need is not just with the curriculum materials they are learning to use for the first time. 

“There are foundational things people need as they begin something new,” she said. “They’re wondering about things like what is my code for the copier, how do I request sick leave, what do I do if I have to go to the bathroom during class?”

In addition, young teachers who are 22 years old and recent college graduates often end up going into communities where they don’t know anyone and might not know what they need or even the right questions to ask.

“They might need help with even basic things, like establishing their first checking accounts,” she said. “Their social and emotional needs have to be met, too. They have to feel they are part of a team, part of a community. If those needs aren’t met, you’re doomed. You can’t even get around to mentoring them to become good teachers. They aren’t going to stick around.”

Mentoring programs are a key focus of CERRA, which supports school districts in providing training to teacher mentors. All new teachers in South Carolina should have a mentor in their first year of teaching; but in some smaller rural districts with small staffs and budgets, that isn’t always happening, she said. Mentor teachers most often work in the same building as their mentees, but not always in the same grade level or subject area, Mentors are likely sacrificing their own planning periods during the school day and their personal time after school to meet with and support new teachers.

“Relying on mentors to give up their own time to meet with new teachers is a system that won’t sustain itself,” she said. “Some of our larger districts are able to hire teachers whose jobs are to work as full-time mentors for new teachers, but that takes funds that many districts don’t have.”

Dr. Garrett earned her PhD in public policy from Virginia Commonwealth University and worked at Winthrop University’s Department of Enrollment Management before joining CERRA in 2008. Though she has taught at the university level, she decided research was her greatest passion and was determined to find a position that would allow her work to benefit teachers. Along with studying teacher supply and demand, Dr. Garrett’s role includes providing the state legislature with data to show that CERRA’s recruitment and retention programs are effective.

The Teaching Fellows Program is one of the organization’s most effective initiatives, her research shows. The program recruits talented high school seniors into the teaching profession and helps them develop leadership qualities. The program provides fellowships for up to 200 high school seniors who have exhibited high academic achievement, a history of service to their school and community, and a desire to teach in South Carolina. Teaching Fellows enter their colleges as a cohort, and they become a support system for each other. 

Fellows receive high-quality professional training on such topics as diversity education, leadership development, and advocacy for students, teachers, and the profession. Fellows begin to observe classroom teachers as early as their freshman year so they are prepared for the work they have chosen as a career. Another incentive is the funds (up to $6,000 a year for four years) they receive while completing their education degrees. A Fellow agrees to teach in a South Carolina public school one year for every year he or she received funds.

The program is a bright spot in the otherwise bad news Dr. Garrett often delivers about the teacher shortage. Seventy-one percent of graduating Teaching Fellows have remained employed in public school districts in South Carolina since the program began in 1999.

With every small step of progress in teacher retention, Dr. Garrett remains hopeful that school leaders will be listening and learning from what is working. The teachers who are choosing to remain in their classrooms are there for a reason, she says.

“We’re not going to be able to recruit ourselves out of this shortage. Statistically it’s not possible to fill the gaps. Keep them there, support them, value them, respect them — and maybe they’ll stay.”

References:

Center for Educator Recruitment, Retention, and Advancement (CERRA). 2020. South Carolina Annual Educator Supply & Demand Report. https://www.cerra.org/uploads/1/7/6/8/17684955/2019-20_supply_demand_report.pdf

The Storyteller

“Every human is an artist. And this is the main art that we have — the creation of our story.”

Don Miguel Ruiz, author

When hunting wild game in the woods of South Carolina, Fort Mill science teacher Macey Brazzell brings along her lucky Browning A-5 shotgun and wears enough camouflage to look like a walking shrub. She also packs plenty of patience — like on the foggy April morning she and her father braced themselves against pine trees and waited for gobblers.  

Macey’s dad sat just behind her so he could whisper instructions if needed. Soon, he began calling the turkeys. “He used a hand call and a mouth call — they make piercing, screeching sounds that are like a real turkey,” she said. “If you don’t sound convincing, they won’t come.”

After a time, father and daughter looked across the field in front of them and saw a turkey head bobbing up over the hill about 40 yards away. Macey aimed and fired. 

“It was the most beautiful turkey — about 20 pounds. My dad made me walk out there and get it. Then we took pictures of us with my turkey and laughed and replayed every moment leading up to the gobbler coming out. It’s hard to shoot a flying object, but he never stopped working with me, practicing with me. We still replay the moments of that day even now.”

Just as she has learned to be patient and persevere when waiting for a deer or gobbler, Macey knows she must have patience when working with her middle school students.

“I’ve missed deer — I moved, they moved, or they smelled me. If I do something that causes me to miss, I have to find what works for me. It’s just like teaching. Learning from mistakes is the most important part. If I have a lesson that doesn’t go smoothly, I just have to think about why it didn’t work and try again another day.”

Macey and her father, Ron Brazzell

Every hunter has stories, and Macey has a lifetime of them that she shares with her sixth graders at Banks Trail Middle School in Fort Mill. Hunting with her father and Paw Paw since she was six years old has taught her much about animals and plants and yielded many lessons she leans on in her life as a teacher. 

The first time I met Macey was the day she interviewed for the job she now holds at Banks Trail. Even then as a college senior, she seemed more than ready for her own classroom. Now, three years later, visitors walking into her science lab on any given morning are likely to find a room full of mesmerized 11-year-olds leaning in to hear this master storyteller as she crafts a tale to help her teach her lesson.

“Now the squirrel is one of the most curious animals out there,” she tells her students during a discussion of animal adaptations. “The rattlesnake sits at the bottom of the tree all camouflaged by its color. It rattles the leaves with its tail, and the squirrel gets lured in by the sound. It wants to see what’s rustling the leaves. That’s how the rattler gets the squirrel.”

Another day, when her energy unit sparks one of her students who loves cars to tell the class about hydraulics, Macey joins in and shares about fixing up old cars in her father’s garage.

“My dad loves old Mustangs. He gets them with no engines and builds them from the ground up. I tell my students about how shock absorbers work and how they convert energy and allow a car to bounce so that bumps aren’t so hard on a frame. The kids are like, ‘How did you know that, Miss Brazzell? No offense, but most girls don’t know that kind of stuff.’ I tell them I’ve been around cars and four-wheelers and tractors since I was a little girl, so I picked up on a lot of things.”

Sharing stories reinforces her content; but more importantly, the stories help her build relationships with her students. Each day she makes time for her students to tell their stories, too. If it means putting off the day’s activities for a few minutes, she’ll do it. More vital to her than any lesson plan is showing her students she cares about them. Her classroom, she says, should feel like a family.

“I grew up listening to stories my grandma would tell when we were sitting at the table playing Uno. A story makes you feel close to someone. You learn about them, have insight on them. As a kid, the teachers I loved most were the ones who shared about themselves and their families and told stories from their lives.”

A sort of magic happens when teachers take the time to tell stories and build relationships with their students, she says.

“Knowing me personally, my funny experiences, my stories from childhood, my stories about my pets, my students want to do well in my class. It’s the emotional side of a person’s story that gets you. You know it’s coming from their heart and not them reciting off of some script.”

While Macey is a planner who likes to have her science content mapped out weeks in advance, when it comes to storytelling she prefers spontaneity.  “A kid just asks a question or says something and it triggers a memory for me. Then I’ll say, ‘I’ve got a story for you.’ They may not be interested in what we’re studying at first, but they’ll become intrigued by the stories. They can’t wait to hear what I’m going to tell them next.”

Teaching science through storytelling also helps Macey reach students who struggle with her content. “I am always trying to think about how to explain things to them in a different way. My dad did that for me growing up. If I didn’t understand something, he would take an object in the house and make a visual out of it or make up a story to explain it in a way I could understand.”

For instance, there was the time Macey struggled with a math concept and went to her father for a fresh perspective.

“I’ll never forget when he took me and my friend to McDonald’s, and we were telling him we didn’t understand something in class. He got a pen from the cashier and we practiced math problems on the inside of a McDonald’s fries box. I still remember that to this day. Anything it took for us to get it, he would do it. That’s what I try to do with my own teaching.”

Macey never wondered what career she would choose for her life. Becoming a teacher was her goal even as a young girl. But her dream almost ended when she was in her senior year in the University of South Carolina’s College of Education. During the first part of her year-long internship, she was assigned to a third-grade classroom at Pleasant Hill Elementary School in Lexington, SC. It was there she learned about the power of the “right fit” in the teaching profession.

“I’ve always loved kids and been passionate about them, but with little kids I would rather play with them than teach them. We had two hours for literacy, 30 minutes for math, 30 minutes for science, and 30 minutes for social studies. At the end of all that time we had our notes written down and had gotten everything glued down, but I was never sure if they understood anything. I called my mom crying and told her if this was teaching, I just couldn’t do it. There was just no way.”

The second semester of her internship was in a sixth-grade math classroom just down the road at Pleasant Hill Middle School. “I absolutely loved everything about it.  I felt at home, doing exactly what I wanted to do. I called my mom and told her this was it. I had found my right fit. This was what I wanted.”

Macey told her cooperating teacher, Anne Lott, over and over that “she saved my career.” Seeing promise in her young intern from the beginning, Mrs. Lott often turned the class over to Macey. Mrs. Lott even left Macey in charge and told the substitute teacher to sit at her desk while Mrs. Lott was out for a few days for a family event. 

“After that, I knew I loved it.  I’m so glad she pushed me to jump in like that. She gave me so much confidence. While she was away, I managed everything in the classroom the same way she did.”

Mrs. Lott gave Macey many of the classroom management strategies that she still uses today. “Everything is color coded, down to the baskets each class uses to turn in work, the drawers where supplies are kept, and the stickers they have on their binders. They know if they are in the pink class that if they see something pink it’s for them.”

Students who are talking and not paying attention during instruction will be the last ones to leave the classroom — another tip she learned from Mrs. Lott. “The embarrassment factor of having to be at the back of the line, and of me being disappointed in them, takes the air right out of them. If they keep doing it over and over, I might have to call their parents, but putting the offenders at the back of the line usually takes care of it for me.”

While she considers herself a laid-back teacher who doesn’t get frustrated easily, Macey values being organized and sticks to  routines that help her students function efficiently in class. “Things like how to label their papers, where supplies can be found, where to turn in papers, and how to organize their binders — these are things that there should be no question about, for them or me. It’s important to be proactive and not reactive. Kids should be confident that they know what to do, where to find things, and what is expected of them.”

Her training in lesson planning at USC and her experience with Mrs. Lott gave Macey confidence that carried her through her first year of teaching. While she freely admits it was a hard year — especially juggling many required teacher induction meetings with acclimating to life in her own classroom — she never doubted she had made the right career choice. 

Macey knows the statistics. Of the teachers who left their jobs in South Carolina in 2019, 36% had five or fewer years of experience (CERRA, 2020). She knows first-hand that the struggles many new teachers cite as reasons to leave the profession are real and at times can be overwhelming. Yet, she feels blessed that her first three years have only fueled her joy for the career she chose. 

“I have administrative support at my school. I don’t worry about state testing. I know students have to take the tests, and I know if they don’t do well you can’t hold it against yourself. I know the stories I tell them will help them remember what I taught them. I can tell they enjoy my class, and their parents write to me and tell me things like their child has never been so excited about science class. If I feel confident in my teaching as the year is going along, I will know they’re going to do well.”

As she sits through lengthy professional development sessions, she doesn’t dwell on educational terms and acronyms that even now, three years into teaching, are still difficult to understand.

“All the jargon isn’t what matters. If the kids are learning and the parents can see that, and if at the end of the day the kids are engaged and excited about learning, that’s what’s really important. If they know you love them and will do anything you can to help them learn, you will show them what it’s like to be a good person. Then they will strive to be the same.”

Macey believes one of her strengths as a teacher is her ability to invite her students into inquiry through her guiding questions.

“In my internship they said I was great at questioning — and not just calling on the ones with hands raised for answers. I am careful to call on boys and girls equally. If someone hasn’t raised their hand in a while, that’s the one I’ll call on to make sure they’re listening and they understand. It’s not something I think about, it just happens. It’s a part of me, I guess.”

Macey grew up in Rock Hill, SC, and made the varsity softball team at Rock Hill High School when she was in 7th grade. She played travel softball from ages 10-18 and played varsity softball and volleyball throughout her high school years. Being coached in sports has made her open to constructive criticism, and so she welcomes visitors and evaluators into her classroom. 

“I just say, ‘Everyone come on in, come join the party!’ If I do something right, good. If not, tell me what I need to do to fix it. I don’t mind taking risks, and I don’t want to play it safe. I want you to come in and see my most daring moments so you can give me directions if I need them and help me be a better teacher.”

She fondly remembers when one of her evaluators came in during a lesson on energy. Macey and a student each held one of the paws of a Care Bear to demonstrate a complete circuit. To the immense delight of the class, as Macey and the student squeezed the paws simultaneously, the bear began to sing, “If you’re happy and you know it, shout hooray!” 

Macey channeled the excitement on their faces and their complete engagement in that moment into an inquiry project on how the bear was able to sing. The students’ proposed answers to her questions and then formed their own questions to research and test their ideas.

“There was no rustling paper or getting out of their seats to go blow their noses. They were just all focused on their computers looking for answers to their questions and figuring out for themselves how circuits work. I’ll never ever forget that day.”

Banks Trail Middle “feels like home,” and she can’t wait to see what each day holds or what story she might be inspired to tell her science classes. Even in these times of COVID-19 school closure, she is still crafting stories that she will share with future students when they can gather in her classroom again. Her favorite Bible verse is from 2 Timothy: “God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.” These words speak particularly to her teacher heart and guide her in her work.

“As an adult, I have fears every day. I doubt myself, I worry, I overthink, I stress about things way more than I need to. However, I don’t realize how little importance my fears hold until I hear the fears, see the doubts, and grasp the needs of my students. As teachers, we need to show power in the sense of self-confidence.  If students see our confidence and happiness, it will eventually carry over into them. We always need to show them love because we don’t know what baggage they may be carrying or what amount of love — or lack of — they receive away from school.”

Macey believes “a sound mind” is something else teachers should model daily for their students. 

 “It is so easy to get caught up in stress and think the world is just ending; however, being able to take a step back and breathe has such beauty. Students need to know how to be happy while also juggling life struggles. We need to be that rock-solid example for them so that they grow up able to do this on their own.”

Macey’s favorite stories are the ones she weaves about character traits such as kindness, patience, and generosity. Just after she’s taken attendance and made any necessary morning announcements, she just might draw her sixth graders in with these words: “You’ll never believe what happened to me yesterday!” 

Many times, her stories include her Springer Spaniel, Sampson, who is “just like a human.” Pets are a great way to connect to other people, she told her students one morning. A dog, she said, can change someone’s day.

 “Sampson and I were in Home Depot, and he was riding in the buggy. A lady came up to us and told me she used to go to pet therapy. She said seeing Sampson reminded her of how good dogs make us feel. Pets can bring a lot of happiness to you. They teach you about kindness and staying open to helping others.” 

It was through Sampson that Macey met her boyfriend, Bryse. She was searching for a Springer Spaniel on the Internet and connected with Bryse, who shared information on breeders he knew. Through Bryse’s contacts, Macey found her dog and a human companion who loves his dog — a yellow Lab named Finn — and the outdoors almost as much as she does.

Once, Macey told Bryse about the time her classes made boats out of aluminum foil and simulated the Pilgrims on the Mayflower with pennies to determine how many the boat could hold without sinking. 

“It’s a STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math) lesson on the importance of processing, redesigning, and testing your designs. He laughed and told me, ‘All you do is play all day long!’ I said, ‘Yeah, it seems like we do, but we’re getting a lot of learning done.’ You know you’re in the right profession if you never feel like you’re going to work.”

References:

Center for Educator Recruitment, Retention, and Advancement (CERRA). 2020. South Carolina Annual Educator Supply & Demand Report. https://www.cerra.org/uploads/1/7/6/8/17684955/2019-20_supply_demand_report.pdf

A Teacher’s Heart

“There are going to be people in your life who change your trajectory. They’ll lay down markers on your life’s timeline. They’re the life changers — not the ones that take you away from yourself…but the ones that bring you home.”

Vienna Pharaon

Crowders Creek Elementary School Teacher Rena Duvall and her student, Jordan

It was April 22, 2020, the day South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster announced all schools will be closed for the rest of the academic year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In the quiet and stillness of her dining room, fifth grade teacher Rena Duvall signed off from her day of virtual instruction and sat down to reflect.

“It is the right decision, she wrote in a Facebook post that evening, “but it breaks my heart.”

Teaching is truly part of Rena’s soul, and her heart has been heavy during this unprecedented time. Though she has frequent virtual meetings with her students and checks on them multiple times a day through her school’s online learning platform, she misses greeting them each morning at her classroom door. She misses their hugs. She misses their laughter and smiles.

A 27-year veteran of the classroom, Rena has taught for 17 of those years at the same school — Crowders Creek Elementary in Clover, SC. I met her on her first day in 2002, as I was a 6th grade teacher there at the time. Though Rena’s previous years of teaching experience were all in primary grades in North and South Carolina, our principal, Pat King, saw her as a perfect fit for fifth grade. Curriculum content can be learned, Mrs. King told her, but what’s more important is a teacher’s heart — the kind of heart she saw in Rena.

In all her years at Crowders, Rena has taught fifth grade language arts and social studies. She is a natural at interdisciplinary planning, and I have stood in awe through the years as she seamlessly wove in literacy instruction with the study of United States History from the Civil War to the present. On the walls of her classroom, she keeps a huge timeline with photos and events from this time period and refers to it often throughout her day. In her readers’ and writers’ workshop mini-lessons, her mentor texts might include poems, songs, short stories, or excerpts from articles about the historical events in her curriculum. 

Her classroom library is filled with historical fiction set during every time period covered in her social studies standards. On any given day, during independent reading time her students can be found nestled comfortably on the classroom rug or at their desks engrossed in reading books she’s previewed to them through her regular book talks.  During their study of the Cold War, she whips out her CD of Sting’s “Russians” and plays it while her students follow along with printed copies of the lyrics. After they insist she must play it again, her students begin singing along. 

When COVID-19 closed schools, the challenges of transitioning from face-to-face to virtual learning didn’t stop her creativity and passion. A lover of family and history, Rena was inspired by a photograph in her home one morning as she prepared the day’s video lesson. In her video, entitled “Living Through History,” Rena spontaneously weaves a story about four generations of a family while holding up their photographs one by one. At the end of the story, she reveals that the family members are her own relatives, and that one of them — her great-grandmother Irene Wannamaker Duvall for whom Rena is named — died during the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918.

Irene Wannamaker Duvall

The COVID-19 pandemic has made Rena think often of her great grandmother, — whom she affectionately calls “Rena the First.” All of us have stories with special and personal meaning to our families, she told her students in her video lesson. Use this moment in history to write them down.

“You’re living through history,” she said. “One day you’ll be grown up and telling your kids or grand kids or a classroom of students what it was like to live through the COVID-19 pandemic. The best part of history is when you can make it personal and tell stories. That’s what history is — telling stories.” (Here’s a link to Rena’s video lesson Living Through History.mp4)

Living through these challenging times has reminded Rena that her family has endured many of history’s difficult moments. In the story she told her students, Rena shared that her grandfather lived through the Great Depression and also served in World War II. She told of her father Columbia City Councilman Howard Duvall’s Air Force service in the Vietnam War. She shared her own memories of watching the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion on television while she was a freshman in high school in Cheraw, SC. She told of being a first grade teacher when the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks happened, and that she struggled to explain the event to her young students when the emotion of that day was still so raw for her. 

All of these stories have found their way into her history lessons throughout the years. All the bits of trivia she has shared from her own life and the lives of historical figures she admires have made her students quite astute at the Jeopardy questions she uses for her social studies review games. She jokes that one day one of her students will win the famous game show — and hopefully share half their winnings with her to supplement her retirement pension.

Rena never once considered another career, and she takes pride in her family’s rich legacy of educators who still inspire her daily. Her grandmother Martha McInnes Duvall, mother Allianne Duvall, and aunt Scottie Moore were all teachers. Rena was inspired to attend her alma mater, Winthrop University, by Martha Duvall, who was class president and graduated from Winthrop in 1929. Rena named her son, McInnes, after her Grandmother Duvall.

Collaboration is an absolute necessity for a teacher’s professional growth, Rena says, so she surrounds herself with colleagues who she enjoys sharing ideas and planning with as often as possible. I was lucky to be one of those educators in Rena’s inner circle during my years at Crowders. I moved down from 6th grade to join her fifth grade team in 2003 and worked with her until I left Crowders in 2013. It was during those years that we were both inspired by our collaborations with our mutual mentor, Dr. Helen Cappleman. 

Helen was a nationally-renowned writer of professional development materials on reading and writing instruction, and when we met her she was an administrator in our district office. But Helen longed to work with children and preferred the classroom, so she later joined us as a teacher in fifth grade at Crowders. On her first day at Crowders, Helen dispensed with the back-to-school lectures on classroom procedures and rules and instead had her young students select their own books through a strategy she called “book tastings.” By the end of their first class period with her, the children were responding to their readings with colorful drawings of characters, inferences about significant events, and predictions of how their stories’ plots might unfold. By the end of the first month of school, her students were writing their own books. 

     Helen was a pioneer among us. She encouraged Rena and me and our colleagues to let go of textbooks and worksheets and push our children to choose “real” books, not just excerpts of stories from anthologies. Her mantra was this: Get children to love reading and inspire them to become lifelong readers. That, she said, was more important than any standards and should be our first priority. “Be bold and imaginative as you plan your instruction,” she advised us. “Ask forgiveness, not permission.” 

We were a bit nervous at first when we saw Helen’s fifth graders sprawled on the floor around her classroom. Students were sitting as partners reading and discussing the same book, or they ventured out in the hallway to read aloud to each other as Helen stood by listening. We worried that Helen wouldn’t cover all the required material for the year with her innovative methods. Instead of lecturing at the front of the class, she could be found creating an anchor chart with her children gathered around her on the floor as she taught a mini-lesson on the reading strategy of the day. Later, she could be found sitting “criss-cross applesauce” on the floor, conferencing with individual students as they sat beside her. 

Instead of assigning grammar textbook pages, Helen honed her students’ writing skills with mentor texts that were near and dear to her heart — poems and stories by Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, and Henry David Thoreau. Her writing conferences with each child became opportunities to teach correct grammar within the context of the child’s own writing. She motivated them to create their own writing masterpieces and guided them along the way with her encouragement and feedback. I don’t remember if Helen ever asked for permission or forgiveness. She just kept boldly inspiring her students — and us — from the deep well of love that was her teacher heart. 

Rena soaked up our mentor’s guidance and became a fellow innovator right away. I watched as she transformed her own classroom into a garden of personalized learning. Rena’s students blossomed as she reimagined her teaching with the thematic units she created. She and Helen coaxed me to join them and the rest of our team in planning a 1920s-era extravaganza of activities students could choose from, including poetry writing, silent movie making, and a plethora of research project options. We culminated our unit with live student performances on stage in the Crowders Creek gymnatorium. The whole experience sealed for me that planning together made us all better teachers — and people. Our students grew to love reading and writing much more, and we teachers all came to work with more excitement than ever before. Just as it had always been for Rena and Helen, teaching grew to become part of my soul. 

Rena and I both think of Helen quite often lately as our spirits have lagged during these weeks of quarantine. We remember our visits with Helen when she was diagnosed with cancer and had to retire from her teaching career in 2012. We were devastated that our mentor was no longer teaching beside us and guiding us in our life’s work. We cried together as we watched her illness slowly take her physical strength. Yet we also marveled that even as her pain intensified, her eyes sparkled with light and her laugh remained effervescent. She continued tending her beloved rose bushes and watching for birds — especially hummingbirds, her favorites.

In one of her last visits with Helen, Rena shared about a bird that flew about her own yard each morning. The bird’s daily visits seemed like “universe whispers,” messages from Rena’s loved ones long passed from this world to the next. Helen smiled her sparkling smile that warm fall afternoon and said, “Universe whispers! I like that. I am going to send them to you. Promise me you will look and listen for them.”

Helen died in October 2012. Rena still looks and listens for Helen’s “universe whispers.” Every so often in her classroom, or while hiking, or when her son McInnes says something that touches her heart, she will say, “I hear you, Helen!” 

Rena wonders what Helen would say about these unprecedented times of global pandemic, of closed schools and online learning. She expects it would be something Helen always said to us. Don’t sweat the small stuff. Just keep the children reading and writing about things that matter to them, things that touch their hearts. 

That’s exactly what Rena is doing, even as she teaches from home while seated at her dining room table. And I know that in her rose garden in heaven, Helen is watching, and smiling. 

Helen, far left, and the 5th grade team at Crowders Creek honor Rena (center) with a baby shower.

The Calling

By Amy Rossett

“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen  or even touched –they must be felt with the heart.”

Helen Keller

I am a teacher. I suppose for some, teaching is a job. For me, it is a calling.

My journey began more than 30 years ago, when as a public relations staff writer for a suburban Columbia, SC, school district, I interviewed a teacher who had been named her school’s teacher of the year. She was a veteran of many years in the classroom, yet she was a humble woman who didn’t want a fuss made over her. 

“It’s work I do from my heart,” she told me as we talked in her fourth grade classroom one afternoon. “It is not a job…it is a calling.”

Then she said something else I’ve never forgotten.

“Teaching is the cornerstone to all other professions. Every career has been touched by the work of teachers. Because I teach, I touch the future.”

That’s when I first felt it…the calling. 

The newspaper articles I had written and tucked into my portfolio the year before had already begun to yellow. Now, as a public relations writer, I filed copies of my monthly newsletters in a rusty filing cabinet in a dark, dusty closet in the district office. My writings, while precious to me, were all destined to be buried one day in landfills, long forgotten. 

But this woman’s students would never forget her. They would recall her throughout their lives, just as I remembered my own teachers. It was my own fourth-grade teacher who had first nurtured my love of writing. She spent hours reading and editing my stories and offered suggestions for adding rich details. My eighth-grade literature and grammar teachers shared their love for stories and beautiful writing. Discussing great works of literature in their classes each day made me grow to love writing even more. 

I could still see their classrooms in my mind even after all those years. They had nurtured my dreams, and they did it with love – probably for barely more than minimum wage. But it wasn’t about the money for them. Each classroom I remembered and each one I now visited in my school public relations work seemed a place where positive energy was palpable.

Over the next three years, I began to feel the calling more deeply each time I accepted teachers’ invitations to photograph their lessons and activities. I longed to be a part of the excitement and not just the photographer as I watched middle schoolers deliver supplies to hurricane victims in our state. I watched with wonder as first graders jockeyed for positions closest to their teacher’s rocking chair on the classroom rug. I was amazed at how effortlessly she wove in her questions without taking away from the story’s magic as she read to them. 

I began to wonder if maybe my lifelong dream of being a writer wasn’t just about producing stories for newspapers and newsletters. Maybe I was meant to teach others about the power of the written word. Maybe I could share my own passion for reading and writing and encourage children to love them too, just as my teachers had done for me.

The teachers and school district administrators I worked with became my cheerleaders. The superintendent, whose nickname was “Hap” because of his effervescent personality and eternal smile, cheered the loudest. 

“It will be one of the best decisions of your life,” he encouraged me.

So, I answered the calling. In 1992, I enrolled in a master’s of arts in teaching program for career changers at the University of South Carolina. Fifteen months later, I became a teacher. 

On a hot August day in 1993, I stapled together my first bulletin board display – a hand drawn scientist juggling beakers, test tubes, and models of atoms – and decorated my first classroom in the small town of Clover, SC. Nothing in my graduate studies in education had prepared me for that feeling of standing in my very own classroom staring at the desks and thinking, “Holy cow! There are really 25 kids coming in here next week, and they expect me to teach them!” 

I had planned and hoped to be an elementary school language arts and social studies teacher. The job I was offered was sixth grade math and science in middle school. Gulp. But I wanted to teach, so I said yes. 

Somehow in that overwhelming first year, I infused reading, writing, speaking and listening instruction into math and science. I wondered the whole time if it was o.k. that I was doing this to keep my own sanity while teaching subjects that were always a struggle for me as a student. Turns out I was an innovator, creating multidisciplinary units instead of relying only on my teacher’s manuals. I had college loans and a mortgage to pay, and my starting salary as a teacher was not much higher than what I had made as a school public relations staff writer. But it wasn’t about the money for me. 

Eventually, I did get to teach elementary school language arts and social studies and even returned to the middle school level to teach. Whether it was math, science, social studies, or language arts, I looked for ways to get students reading and writing. My students wrote children’s books about animal adaptations and designed reports for our own classroom weather channel broadcast. Because I was excited about a book and talked about the characters as if they were my friends, students who professed to hate reading began picking up books to give them a try. 

Somewhere along the way a student gave me the title “Queen of Details.” My trademark was teaching young writers to become artists who add color and vivid descriptions to their compositions. Make your readers feel they are there witnessing events right alongside you, I told them.  I had learned my favorite teaching phrase, “Paint pictures with words,” from a newspaper editor. 

I tried to always remember that my students were watching me for more than just how to be successful at the subject matter. They were looking at me as a role model. They were watching my responses to their misbehaving classmates, national tragedies like the September 11 terrorist attacks, and even my own life experiences, which included a divorce, remarriage nine years later to the love of my life, and a miscarriage that would be my one and only pregnancy. I never had children of my own; but in my classrooms, I have been mentor, nurse, counselor, and teacher to more than 1,000 children. Some have even called me mom.

It has been 27 years since my teaching journey began, and I am still in the classroom – now as a literacy specialist and reading interventionist. I often remember Hap’s words to me. He was so very right. It has been one of the best decisions of my life. I still hear from many of my former students — like Brett, who I taught in 5^th grade and who sent me a card and gift to mark his own graduation from high school in 2015.

“Seven years ago, you changed my life for the better,” he wrote to me. “Your kindness, generosity, and determination to teach have been a big part of my success. You noticed me staring at the same pages of a silly book and said, ‘I know you can do better than that.’ Because of your constant feedback and encouragement, I read books like the Bible, Gone with the Wind, and To Kill a Mockingbird. I continued to read at that level after your class. Now I’m graduating and I just won an award for having the highest SAT math and reading scores in my class. Thank you for being part of my education.”

It is because of Brett and so many other children that I still answer the calling every day.

Just as I once did, journalists are covering the news of the day. A story gaining widespread attention is the growing shortage of teachers to fill our nation’s classrooms. A profession that was once highly-respected by the public and sought after by college students is no longer being chosen by many young people, who cite low pay and high stress as reasons for not choosing education as a career. 

Teachers are walking out of classrooms to protest paychecks that force many to work two or more other jobs because their teacher salaries are not enough to support their families. They are decrying state education funding that leaves their classrooms lacking essential supplies and even textbooks, forcing them to spend hundreds of dollars out of their own pockets for essential materials like books for their students.

The state where I teach, South Carolina, is far from alone in its struggles to recruit and retain teachers. A 2016 study by the nonprofit Learning Policy Institute found that teacher education enrollment dropped 35 percent nationwide between 2009 and 2014, and nearly eight percent of the teaching workforce is leaving every year — the majority before retirement age. Shortages of teachers can be found in every state, especially in mathematics, special education, world languages, career and technical education, art, music, and English (Sutcher, et.al, 2016).

Two-thirds of teachers who leave our nation’s classrooms each year do so for reasons other than retirement, the Learning Policy Institute’s report states. Researchers found those reasons include lack of adequate preparation and mentoring, pressures of test-based accountability, lack of administrative support, poor teaching conditions, and low salaries. (Sutcher, et. al, 2016.)

With increased student enrollment and teacher attrition rates expected in our nation’s schools, researchers project that by 2025 there could be as few as 200,000 available teacher hires each year. This would result in a gap of more than 100,000 teachers annually (Sutcher, et.al, 2016).

As states brace for the storm of teacher shortages, both now and in years to come, state legislators and local school boards will grapple with how to pay for increases in teacher salaries and more funding for classroom supplies and equipment. District human resource officers will travel the country recruiting the dwindling number of education majors, offer signing bonuses, and even look to educators in other countries to fill our empty classrooms. 

Those of us who remain in America’s classrooms are on the front lines of this crisis. We are met each day by children whose hunger for food, love, attention, and encouragement must be met before they are ready to learn. Not only do we teach them to think creatively, problem-solve, collaborate and communicate, we prepare our students for jobs that haven’t yet been invented. As technology has infiltrated our classrooms, we have taken on the teaching of digital citizenship while we police our students’ computers for evidence of cyberbullying. 

I remember what it was like to work two jobs to pay my bills. I left my rural classroom after school and traveled to work three days a week from 6-9 p.m. in a nearby shopping mall. It took more than 10 years of teaching and earning an additional 30 hours of graduate credit beyond my master’s degree to finally make above $50,000 in my South Carolina school district. 

I have eaten tuna and saltine crackers for dinner at the end of a month as I waited for payday to come. Each August, I join my colleagues at back-to-school sales, spending hundreds of dollars out of my own pocket on teaching supplies for my classroom. I have scoured roadside piles on trash pickup days for bookcases and tables for my classroom. 

There were times I almost left the profession. I felt the pressures of standardized testing and the push to raise scores. The constantly-changing academic standards and accountability measures were partly to blame, as well as the salary. 

Yet, in spite of all these challenges, I and many others are still answering the calling to teach. The teachers whose stories you will read in this blog represent one state — South Carolina — but they are, in essence, portraits of all of us. We are young, middle-aged, and old; we are fresh out of college or changing careers. We are novices and veterans who, though nearing retirement, choose to teach on. 

We hope administrators and parents will trust us to teach the academic standards in ways we know are in the best interest of our students. We hope there will be more money in our paychecks someday. We hope that one day our states will fund education to a higher degree. 

But we will keep buying pencils, books, and notebooks for our classrooms. We will still coach a sport or work extra jobs at night, on weekends, and during summer break to pay the bills. We will still host working lunch sessions where we counsel and tutor our students while they eat. We will tirelessly seek new and better ways to teach our content, but we will prize our relationships with our students over any academic standards. For our work is guided by a profound truth: Teach to the heart, and the mind will follow.

Every teacher has stories of students who fill our dusty filing cabinets with letters, cards, and drawings. For us, it is these tokens of love that are the true measure of our success. We return to our classrooms each day because there are children waiting for us. They are waiting for the encouragement and the inspiration we will give them.

We could do anything with our lives. But we choose to teach.

References:

Sutcher, L., Darling-Hammond, L., and Carver-Thomas, D. 2016. Coming Crisis in Teaching? Teacher Supply, Demand, and Shortages in the U.S. (research brief). Palo Alto, CA: Learning Policy Institute.