From the Pulpit to the Lectern

Three angels in my life directed me from one career choice to my being able to help young people develop their communication skills. But working with these young people also was cause for my fears. I desperately needed to discover myself, the man within. For forty years I interacted with high school teenagers as an English teacher, drama director, forensics coach, school counselor and with older students as a college professor. I can honestly say that throughout those years as an educator I am quite certain that I learned as much from my students as they learned from me. I entered my first classroom as a naive, insecure young man with immense fears of the "real" me being discovered and I left as a senior citizen comfortable with my life, my values, and most of all myself. It was the students in between those years, every one of them but particularly a special few, who helped shape the man I was to become and it was the students, their parents, fellow coaches, and the men and women who taught next to me or down the hall from me who impacted me in such a way that I never dreamed possible when I first entered this career. In From the Pulpit to the Lectern I will introduce you to some of those students so that you can experience, as I have, the powerful bond that can exist between students and teachers, seeing not just how it shaped the students but how it shaped me, their teacher - the man with the educated chalk.