Discover more from The Phil Overeem (Failed) Farewell to Teaching Tour
Phases and Stages, Part 1
As I begin Year 41 as a teacher (not counting swim lessons!), I look back at my locales as "phases" and try to nutshell them without requiring you to abandon your own daily goals.
“Circles and cycles / Let me tell you some more….”
Winter/Spring 1984: Student teaching, Greenwood Lab School, Southwest Missouri State University, Springfield, Missouri.
Similarly to some parents’ approach to teaching their kids to swim, I was thrown in and ignored. You can’t really know if you like teaching until you do it, but even on Day 1 it seemed like…home. Teaching 12th and 7th graders without any daily host teacher support, and making a host of egregious errors, I still enjoyed and looked forward to it. I loved literature, writing, poetry, and song lyrics, so that helped, and, oddly, speaking in front of 20-25 humans felt easier to me than talking to friend or family one on one. Weird. Even then, I felt more myself in front of a class than in any other situation than being alone. My favorite memory was using Neil Young’s “Thrasher” to discuss how to break down a piece of verbal art into relatively clear meaning. The seniors invited me to their post-prom party, I ill-advisedly went, but, very predictably, talked about music, philosophy, and literature until I was the last one awake. My oldest former students, as of this date, are 60 years old!
Fall 1984 to Spring 1990: Parkview High School, Springfield, Missouri.
This phase is best represented by a series of facts.
I was never told the number of students to expect in a class, so when my roster listed over 150 in five classes, I thought that was normal. Thinking it was normal helped me survive it—I assumed it was the job. Similarly, I wasn’t told how many papers a student should write in nine months, so I deduced they’d need to write eight in order to improve, which I stuck to for (too) MANY years. Do the math. I just assumed it was what they had to do and I had to grade. Had I known I should have been skeptical, ironically, I might have broken. Had I known there were alternative methods, I might not have been asleep at 7:30 pm on Friday nights.
I was asked to sponsor—to revive—a literature club at the beginning of my second year. Being a low-key punk rocker, I said no. My evaluating assistant principal, assigned to evaluate me, was the asker, and he looked askance at me and said, “This isn’t a choice.” In two years sponsoring The Canterbury Society, since I had to do it, we had fun—always a requirement for anything I do as an educator, if at all possible—mainly by annually being locked into the library for 24 hours to read as many pages as we could to, via pledges, raise money for The Developmental Center of the Ozarks. We raised almost $5000 over two years. (Now it can be told: during our opening meeting, after I’d been assigned the club sponsorship, I was desperately trying to recover from a psychedelic mushroom experience that I was promised would end many hours earlier. I was called down to the office the following Monday, expecting to be interrogated about my behavior at the meeting. The assistant principal, on the contrary, had received numerous calls from parents enthusing about their kids’ reaction to the meeting and our plans. Whew.)
I was asked, after my apparently successful attempt to revive The Canterbury Society, to sponsor the school student council, this time by the building principal (Dolores Brooks, probably the BEST principal I ever worked for). Again, I said no, basically because I was really enjoying sponsoring The Canterbury Society. She looked at me weirdly, and I left (I had to go teach). During lunch the same day, she called me back into the office, and, peering down her nose a bit, said, “You misunderstood. You don’t have a choice. You are going to be the student council sponsor.” Then she chuckled. And I chuckled. I’m a slow learner, but once I get it, I get it. Also, at this point, I still didn’t know what tenure was and did not have it. Significant.
During my two years as a student council sponsor, I was blessed with amazing cabinet members who had great ideas, worked hard, and believed we could pull off anything. I’m not lying: during football homecoming week, we spent 85 hours at school writing assembly scripts and executing the assembly, conducting elections, planning the crowning ceremony, and organizing the dance. We were gifted one class period per day to work on all of that, but 50 minutes were only enough to talk ourselves into a plan. These kids were amazing—too amazing. My last year there, we decided to do both a fall and spring blood drive, and broke the city high school record for pints both times. Instead of being praised, the new principal chided us for being “out of control.” Later, when, under very palpable pressure, we did not choose his 10th grade daughter to be part of the next year’s cabinet—she probably would have made it as an 11th or 12th grader, as we by unwritten rule only put 10th graders on if they were supernovas—he refused the list of members we submitted. The worst experience of my early educational life: I reconvened the current cabinet, who interviewed applicants, and asked them, “Should we put her on just to get him off our back, or hold to your choices and take whatever vitriol he doles out?” They opted to put his daughter on, but when I presented the new roster, he tore it up and, through tears, bawled, “I know she’s not good enough.” I reassured him she was fine, but needed more seasoning. He needed to go to meeting, and, still in tears, dismissed me. I knew he was a little…off. As you will see next entry, I caught a break, because the next school year was bound to be painful.
I happened to find myself the lead singer in a band my final year at Parkview. We named ourselves Red West after Elvis’ right-hand Memphis Mafia dude. We mostly played house parties, but we scored a gig at an actual club that spring—and it so happened that the student body president I was supervising also had a band (which included a former favorite student of mine). We needed an opener, so we chose them. How many times has a gig occurred where the featured band was led by a public school student council sponsor, and the opening band was led by the student body president? We did not totally suck! AND? The president’s mom was the president of the STATE school board!
Musical Moment
One of the songs my band covered:
For being (as people used to refer to me) "just a teacher," you certainly have led a colorful life! There are many things we are not taught in teacher ed classes not the least of those being when you are asked to do something, you just do it. One of the great blessings of teaching is to be in touch with students we had years ago. Treasured time!