Time warp Tuesday and more of me teaching....

I seem to be using Time Warp Tuesday to tell the story of my teaching.  2 Tuesdays ago, just out of college teaching preschool, last Tuesday teaching blind multi-handicapped kids in Chicago, and today brings us to 1994 when the wife and I moved to Massachusetts and taught at a boarding school.  Ours was not a big name boarding school (I taught kids with learning disabilities, the snootier schools were more academically competitive than that) but it was a very beautiful school, very old, with an excellent education and facilities AND we played all the nearby snootier schools in sports, like Groton, Andover, Northfield Mount-Hermon etc.

We lived in Chicago and I had done some more graduate work, training to teach high school students with trouble reading etc., coupled with the wife's teaching background AND my expertise in art AND willingness to coach cross country and track AND our naive willingness to live in and manage kids in dorms....well, a recruiter gave us a lot of possibilities, and we went to the school that needed a new (remedial) English teacher who could teach pottery on the side with a wife who could teach photography.

You imagine that teaching in a boarding school is very DEAD POETS SOCIETY...and it is.  Old brick and stone buildings and orange maple trees and such, eating in the big dining room, all the tradition.  But it is also exhausting!  You are babysitting a crowd of teenagers 24/7!!! Many of the teachers, you later realize, are recent college grads (doing this for a couple of years before running off to grad school) for a reason:  young and energetic!  What we found in teaching there for 3 years was that although you and your spouse are always in the same area, you are not together in privacy.  Kids can and do knock on your door in the dorm at any time and you have to help them.  So, you teach them all day, coach them in the afternoon, have all your meals with them, then evening activities and study hall, sports on the weekend plus activities plus night duty on call..... Our vacations were much better than day schools, but still I could see that if I stayed in that environment I would go nuts, and wanted to instead leave at the top of my game before I became bitter and twisted.  Both the headmaster and department head asked me to come back when I said was leaving.  I am glad they did, it means I had done a good job, but I would have killed somebody if I made it a career ;) The wife said to me after 2 years "you want to be a potter?  You should be a potter!" (oh YES, she is the BEST woman on earth) and so we spent our third and final year teaching planning my new career as a potter.

Here are a couple of good pics, I am the dude with the big 'stache :)




(You know that Jenn started this and there are many of us who participate including Brightside Susan and smalltown me  and jen rants and raves and Tonya Lynn    and Fond of Snape  . Basically, a fun way to dig up and share some old photos!!!!)