On Teaching

When I was in college, I read Stephen King's book On Writing, and it changed my life. I had just gotten into writing for my college newspaper, and reading this manifesto on the ways to go about writing, when to consider yourself an author, and generally analyzing the whole process of sitting down and pouring a little bit of yourself onto the page really stuck with me. After I read his book, I committed myself to the craft and really took off as a writer. I started to make money, and not just pocket change, by selling stories and articles whenever I could. I really felt like I was on my way to being the next Tom Sorenson, Joe Posnanski, or Jeff Pearlman.

Well folks, obviously things didn't end up like I intended. I got out of college with my sparkling diploma, and found that newspapers weren't hiring. Magazines weren't either. And making money freelance is hard to do, so sometimes you are eating steak and sometimes you are on the all ramen, all the time diet. I tried my hand at substitute teaching and really fell in love with it, I felt like I could be in a classroom for the rest of my life and be 100% happy with it.

About 6 months ago my journey to become a teacher started. I registered as a lateral entry teacher, signed up for the Praxis exams, and headed off on my way. As soon as my Praxis scores came through, I started applying for jobs. The first one I applied for gave me an interview, and I got offered a position at South Iredell High School the first week of July.

I just wrapped up my third week of teaching full time, and it has been a roller coaster ride. Every day is an adventure. I never know how my kids will react to what I have planned, if my lecture will generate an awesome discussion that goes right up to the bell, or if I will get nothing but dead eyes and vacant stares, and have to scramble to get through the whole period without resorting to the dreaded "find something productive to do" method. But in the midst of dealing with 60 rowdy 16 year olds on a daily basis, I had a moment that literally changed my life.

My second week of class I did a poetry analysis class period, to get my kids used to how I teach and figure out if my method was going to work with these students. I chose three poems that I am very familiar with and love: "Fire and Ice" by Robert Frost, "Invictus" by William Ernest Henley, and "Ozymandias" by Percy Blythe Shelley. I know these three poems backwards and forwards, I have them memorized and can talk about them all day if somebody will sit there and listen for that long a time period. I had the students talk about these poems with me, figure out the themes and similarities, and at the end of the period gave them homework where they needed to tie these three works together in some way. I just wanted to know if the kids had held onto some of what I had been saying for 90 minutes, to see if I was effective.

As class was ending, a young man walked by me and said "That was the first time in my life that poetry was interesting. Thanks for that Mr. A." I am not sure who was more shocked, me or him. I had hoped that my lesson would be effective, that the kids would have a little more insight into literature than they had before. I chalked it up as hyperbole, that he was saying something he maybe didn't mean, to impress me or something.

The moment that made me fall in love teaching, that almost made me cry, happened the next day. I was in my classroom during my lunch hour, when I get some work done and maybe 20 students sit in my room for social time. I sat back in my chair for a second to take my mind off of the papers I was grading, when a unfamiliar face started talking to me. This girl asks me, "Mr. Alexander, when I have you next month are we going to do the poetry thing. My friend said it was really cool, and I don't want to miss out on it." I am not sure how I held it together long enough to get to the faculty bathroom. Never in my life did I think that I would be a teacher. And here I sat in a classroom with my name on the door, having kids asking me if I could make sure to do the really cool activity that students had done the day before. The moment, when I realized I had reached my students, and taught them something that had them talking to their friends about it, hit me like a freight train. I knew then, without a shadow of a doubt, that I will teach for the rest of my working life. I had heard horror stories about first year teachers, and here I was being asked my a student to make sure I repeated my lecture on poetry of all things, because she didn't want to miss out on it. If that student only knew how much her question made me feel, how knowing that I gave my kids a lesson that they felt was good enough to talk with their friends about validated all of the work that went into that 90 minute lesson. Until that point, I hadn't seen the kids really connect with what I said. At that moment, it hit me that I can really make a difference with what I am doing.

I am about to start my fourth week of teaching this Monday. I've got lessons to plan, papers to grade, a sports team to help coach, and find some time to fit my personal life into all of that. But it is those moments when kids let you know that what you are doing is important, is meaningful, that what I am doing every day is having an impact, is what get's me through some of those long days.

I love what I do.
 I do not have to go to work every morning. I get to.
Nothing could make me happier.

Thanks to you, Dan Brown

I can thank Dan Brown and his solidly ok novel, Deception Point, for introducing me to the girl who I have been dating for the past three and a half years.

You see, I was at work lifeguarding a neighborhood pool I had been at for a couple of summers when a very pretty girl came by to tan and swim. I watched her sit down behind my sunglasses, hoping that she would not catch me staring, as I thought of a way to start a conversation. For a good 30 minutes I tried to think of a way to introduce myself without being creepy, and as the clock ticked down the minutes towards the adult swim when I would have to walk by her, I was nervously thinking of anything to say to this girl to not come across as a weirdo.

After 10 agonizing minutes in thought, I had to get up and take my adult swim break. I got off the stand with nothing, I was drawing dead as poker players say. Every step toward her chair was agony, until I saw that she was reading a book, and not just a regular book, but one I had read before. So as I am walking by, I blurt out "That is a good book you are reading," and then scampered away before this beautiful girl could reply. In my mind, I had done all I could. The ball was now in her court, so if she decided to talk to me, it was all up to her.

Following the break, I walked around the opposite end of the pool so that there would be no awkwardness, and got back in my stand to stare at the bottom of the pool for another hour. The next thing I know, pretty girl herself is jumping into the pool and heading my way. My lord, my line actually worked. Chalk that up as the worst pick up line of all time, but it worked. All of a sudden, I had just met my girlfriend, Cassie, and we have been together for three and a half years now.  I don't think anybody who could have seen my conversation starter would have known what they were looking at, the start of a long term relationship. And I can't blame them; after all, my friend Matt swears that I am "hitting way over my batting average" with Cassie.

After that first conversation, we had the what is supposed to be really awkward first date, but it went fabulously. Or it must have, because Cassie decided I was worth seeing again. Then, she passed the crucial test of meeting my two dogs, and it wasn't long until we were dating, ready to face the difficulty of a long distance college relationship.

I am writing this because I can't help but think of how extraordinarily bad my opening line was. Every time we tell the story of how we met to people, they laugh at how awful I was at starting the conversation. My college buddies used to do a creepily accurate impersonation of me walking by and blurting out "Thats a good book you are reading" to hilarious results.

As time has gone by, we have built a good relationship together, despite all of the difficulty that living hours apart entails. We have learned to cherish the weekends, winter breaks, and summertime that we get to spend together, which has let us appreciate the other more that we might have otherwise. We just had our 4th Valentines day together, which we spent cooking together, dancing to country music in her living room, and watching her beloved Disney movies. Looking back, I can't help but shake my head at both how we started, and all of the good times that have led to us today.

So everyone, raise your glasses and tip your caps to Dan Brown's 4 star rated novel Deception Point, because it got my relationship of three and a half years started.

You may never read that sentence ever again, which is what makes it beautiful.

The Magnus Effect

When I was a sophomore in college, I took a Creative Writing class that functioned as a writing workshop. As part of the class, we had to submit things that we wrote to get reviewed by the rest of the people in the class. For our first assignment, we had to write a 300 word or less "short." I submitted the following story: 

I twisted the ball in my hands, trying to place my fingers on the seams the way my dad had showed me seconds earlier. The waves crashing twenty feet to my right and the hard-packed sand under my feet were of no consequence at that moment. I brought my right arm back behind me in a circular motion, my elbow making a “t” in relation to my body, before bringing my hand and the ball next to my ear. At this point, I exploded my arm forward, twisting my wrist around the ball as I released it into the thick, coastal air. The baseball, traveling about 50mph, hurtled towards my dad, before making an abrupt, sudden drop, with a slight left-hand turn. The ball seemed to defy physics, my 13-year-old mind didn’t understand how it could change direction so suddenly.

 Sitting in a AP physics class five years later, I would learn about the Magnus effect and how airflow around the seams of the ball caused it to drop and turn through the air. But at that moment, as the ball plummeted towards the earth, the only thing running through my mind was “I cant believe I just did that.” As the ball popped into my fathers catchers mitt, he shouted “Hooo boy, that one snapped off!” A grin seemed to split my face in two as I got my dads approval on my first successful curveball.

 Since that day in July on the shores of Cherry Grove beach, I have thrown many more curveballs. Some have been hit hard, others have resulted in strikeouts, and one curveball badly fooled a catcher and hit him in the mask. No curveball will ever be as special as the one I snapped off to my father for the first time. The popping of the catcher’s mitt and the coastal wind whipping across the beach are forever overmatched by my dads excited voice shouting about the first time I made a baseball bend and hook through the air. That moment is frozen in my mind, for me to look back on and smile. After all, you don’t do something for the first time very often.

After the class, the professor came up to me and said that I had produced a really good writing sample. She happened to have a contact at a online baseball journal, and wanted to know if I was interested in getting my short published. I told her absolutely, and over the next few weeks I talked with the website to get everything worked out. Eventually, this became the first thing I ever got paid to write. I looked recently to try to find this online, to have a record of my first published thing. Sadly, I couldn't find it. 

Stephen King has the opinion that if you write something, and someone gives you a check for it, and that check doesn't bounce, and you use that check to pay a bill, then you can call yourself a professional writer. I am glad to say that the words in italics are the ones that started my writing career. It might not be my best writing, but its the stuff that made me think I have a future in it. 

Yours, Ryan 

I should have watched Mr. Holland's Opus one more time

Looking out across my desk at the bunch of teenagers sitting quietly, I could almost see their thoughts in bubbles, like in comic strips.

“Oh geez, one more day of this grammar review…”

“What is for lunch, I am starving; only 4 hours to go.”

“Sweet! A sub, we won’t be getting anything done today.”

Yup, if you had told me when I was a Senior in high school that I would be on the other side of that desk just two months after getting done with college, I would have literally laughed out loud. 18 year old me knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that teaching was not for me. I would never, ever, EVER teach. Going beyond me not being the most spectacular student, I was positive that I did not have the patience or the determination to get through to students. Ryan Alexander was not meant to teach.

It is funny how much things can change. College has a way of making people grow up, in the classroom and as a person. Not everyone can be away from home for the first time and still uphold all of their responsibilities with no parents or guardians there to keep an eye on things. There is a reason that the fail rate of college freshman has been right around 33% for decades. Some kids, statistically about one out of three, cannot handle going to school on their own away from home. By all measures, I should have been one of those statistics. I wasn’t a good student in high school, I didn’t try hard enough to really do anything noteworthy during those long four years. Based on that alone, I was a contender to be out of college by Thanksgiving of my freshman year, unable to cut it.

But to the shock of literally everyone who knew me in high school, I made it through my first year at Western Carolina. And then I made it through the second. All of a sudden, barring a complete collapse, I was going to make it through college. Those four years in Cullowhee flew by, but come August 5^th 2013, I got my diploma from Western. The job market isn’t so hot at the moment, and getting into writing is more difficult than I ever imagined. After some thought, I figured trying some substitute teaching wouldn’t hurt. If I liked it, I could keep going with it, and if not I could chalk it up as a lesson learned.

So on September 27^th my career as a teacher started. All decked on in my shirt and tie, with nothing but nerves and contingency plans for unruly high school kids rattling around in my head, I stepped off into the great unknown. That first day seemed to take forever. I was nervous and timid, not sure what to say to kids that were only a few years younger than me. Having authority over  kids who looked barely younger than me was a challenge. In fairy tale world, that first day went off without a hitch. In reality, I am sure that I could have improved on my classroom management, and keeping the students busy and on task with their homework.

I have done more sub teaching over the last couple of weeks, and I find myself liking it more and more every time I do it. The teachers that I work with are incredibly helpful, and for the most part the students have been fine. I find myself being proactive and asking students questions about what they are working on, so that I can lend them a hand if they need it. I have learned that I know a lot more than I realized, and actually have some knowledge that the students can use. This past week, I helped a student with complex sentences and the use of dependent and independent clauses, stuff that I haven’t thought about in at least six or seven years.  It is still a shock to hear “Mr. Alexander” whenever kids ask me something, and I made the mistake of telling a student my first name in a conversation when I didn’t mean to say it.

I can see myself sticking to teaching, and helping kids like me be better students and avoid the mistakes that I made in high school. I don’t want these kids to surprise people when they make it through college. If I can help prepare them even a little bit, I will be happy. 

So you can call me Mr. Alexander from now on. I think I am finally used to hearing it.

Your effort is futile

I remember the last time that Western Carolina University won a Southern Conference football game.

It was homecoming weekend in Cullowhee, and The Citadel was in town to play the Catamounts of WCU. The weather was absolutely miserable, maybe 40 degrees at kickoff, even though it was only mid October. In fact, sometime during the second half, it started to snow a little bit.

At this point, Western was still able to convince students to come out to the games. We were still kind of competitive, even though the head coach was a complete jerk as well as a tub of lard. I think he weighed at least 350 pounds. But that is irrelevant to him being a truly terrible football coach and recruiter. Either way, in the good ole days of 2009, WCU was not the joke that it is now in terms of fielding a football team. The Cats could be counted on to keep thinks close most of the time, and at least keep the student body distracted long enough to get outside on the weekends for a few hours.

The Citadel rolled into town, and I remember people talking around the parking lot where my friends and I were tailgating that we might actually win the game. The Citadel was having a down year, and WCU actually had a good chance at pulling out a victory.

Western went into halftime of the game down 10-0, and as soon as the marching band wrapped up their halftime show, the stands started to empty. This happens at every single WCU football game, and is one reason in my mind that our program cannot improve. Who wants to play at a school where the majority of the crowd is there to see a bunch of skinny kids act important for 15 minutes and then go home. The answer is nobody. Until the day that fans stay in their seats past halftime at WCU football games, they will never be good. But I digress.

For once in his life, Dennis Wagner gave a effective halftime speech or made the necessary adjustments at the midpoint of the football game. The Cats came out in the second half and put a whuppin on the cadets from the Citadel. Western shut their opponents out in the second half, and scored with 10 minutes left in the fourth quarter to put the winning number, 14-10, on the board.  I remember the final whistle blowing and jumping the railing onto the field along with what seemed like every student left in the stadium. Everybody ran onto the field to celebrate our first and last victory of the season. Since that day, October 17th 2009, Western has lost every Southern Conference football game it has competed in. 23 in a row.

It is hard to do anything 23 times in a row. 23 is a lot of times to do the same thing over and over again. But WCU has managed to hit the field in the SoCon and get beat 23 times in a row. It is so pathetic it almost makes you want to laugh to keep from crying about it.

Oh yea, I almost forgot:  Go Cats