See the Future, Look to the Past

Well, tomorrow is the first day back for teachers.  Every year this day has created a dichotomy for me.  On the one hand it is great to reconnect with the staff and meet the newbies; on the other it has meant a long day of listening to what the new ideas that need to be implemented and endless review of the rules.  Our QIT tried very hard this time to make this less of a drudgery.  In the end, I realize you can't please everyone.

So, I hope that you don't mind that I take this post in a totally different direction.  I realized that to make this blog have it's true starting point, I feel compelled to relate how my career got its start.  In order to do that, I have to go back to 1971.  I graduated from Manchester College in May, but not really.  That is because I was one credit short (I had mono my sophomore year and had to drop out of two classes while taking the others by correspondence).  The class that I needed was Intro to Music.  All of you that know me, you know that was perfect!

That was the only summer since I was 12 years old that I didn't have a job.  The problem was that I didn't have a job for fall.  But it didn't last long.  After two weeks of summer school down, my father told me that I needed to call Clarence Biedenwig.  Clarence was one of the many contacts that my father had in various locals of Fort Wayne.  He was in charge of the health and physical education classes in Fort Wayne Community Schools.

Now for those of you that have had to go through numerous interviews to get a job, you may not want to read any further.  Assuming that I was headed to an interview, I dressed up and made myself sick from anxiety.  When I reached his office, he held out his hand, greeted me wholeheartedly and handed me the paper that told me what my assignment would be.  I actually left that day thinking that is the way that you get a job.

The job that I accepted was to be an elementary physical education teacher at Whitney Young Elementary, even though I had never  taught a class below seventh grade in student teaching.  In addition, I was to be assistant football and baseball coach at South Side High School.  A few years later I found out that neither the Young principal nor the South principal had any say in the matter.

I relate this story, because there were a lot of stories like mine in the early 70's because there just weren't enough teachers.  Tuesday I found out that we lost another teacher at the last minute, because schools are scrambling to find teachers.  In my first blog, I mentioned that I was worried about the future of education when there weren't enough teacher.  The future is here!f