Joy Bliss This: A Teacher's Journey

By William Quigley

In his book Joy Bliss This, William Quigley tells the story of becoming a teacher, a journey he never planned to take, and one that was filled with repeated failure from the start. At his lowest point, when he had fallen the farthest and needed the most help, his students were the ones who saved him. In that redemption, he found a way to make a positive impact on the world through teaching, and he learned the ultimate lesson, that excellence is what we are here for. In being lost and finding his way, William’s teaching adventure serves as a guidepost and guardrail for your own journey toward excellence. We are our stories; this is his. Come along with him. The adventure is calling. Let’s begin!

• Language: English
• Publisher: IndieGo Publishing
• Release date: Mar 9, 2018
• ISBN: 9781946824134

Book preview

Joy

Bliss

THIS

A teacher’s journey

WILLIAM QUIGLEY

Joy Bliss THIS

Copyright © 2018 William Quigley

Paperback ISBN 9781946824110

Hardcover ISBN 9781946824127

Ebook ISBN 9781946824134

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be copied or stored without the author and publisher’s permission.

Editing, Interior Design, and Cover Concept:

Janet Angelo of INDIEGO PUBLISHING

Cover Design by Kura Carpenter

www.kuracarpenterdesign.com

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017962610

Publisher’s Cataloging-In-Publication Data

(Prepared by The Donohue Group, Inc.)

Names: Quigley, William, 1969-

Title: Joy bliss this : a teacher's journey / William Quigley.

Description: [Florida] : IndieGo Publishing LLC, [2018]

Identifiers: ISBN 9781946824110 (paperback) | ISBN 9781946824127 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781946824134 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Quigley, William, 1969---Career in education. | Teachers--Biography. | Teaching. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Educators. | EDUCATION / Professional Development. | EDUCATION / Teaching Methods & Materials / Social Science.

Classification: LCC LB885.Q542 J69 2018 (print) | LCC LB885.Q542 (ebook) | DDC 370.92--dc23

Published in the United States of America by

INDIEGO PUBLISHING LLC

Think Indie. Go Create. Publish.

www.indiegopublishing.com

_____________________

Saint Thomas More:

Why not be a teacher? You’d be a fine teacher, perhaps a great one.

Richard Rich:

If I was, who would know it?

Saint Thomas More:

You, your pupils, your friends, God. Not a bad public that.

~ A Man for all Seasons, Robert Bolt

_____________________

We are on a journey to keep an appointment with whoever we are.

~ Gene Roddenberry

_____________________

Drive away and try to keep smiling. Get a little rock and roll on the radio and go toward all the life there is with all the courage you can muster. Be true; be brave; stand. All the rest is darkness.

~ IT, Stephen King

_____________________

Dedication

_________________________________________

To my first teachers, my parents, who taught me all the lessons that helped to make me the man and teacher I am.

To my brothers and sisters, who have always been on this journey with me, thank you for being the best.

To all the colleagues, the great teachers, the leaders, the comforters of kids, thank you for being my friends and my guides. I have seen excellence in so many, but I especially must acknowledge Linda Gass, Carter Hannah, Roseanne Ganim, Sue Cooper-Smith, and Carrie Hyacinth.

To my mentors, especially Jeanne Kurth, Elfie Israel, and Debbie Tabie, you were the standard, the excellence I sought.

To the great leaders who always encouraged excellence in me, especially Frankie St. James and Peter Bayer.

To all my friends, especially Nat, Sean, and Tracy, who were always there for me and have always pushed me to be better.

To my editor and publisher, Janet Angelo, for making my words shine, and for becoming my friend.

And to my students, all the names, the faces, the souls, the kids who have blessed my life, I am nothing unless I am your teacher. You’ve made my life. I’ve learned far more from you than I ever taught you, and I owe you more thanks, more appreciation, than language can express. When my teaching career is over and I look back on my life, I will be able to say with nothing but pure, deep, joyful pride, I was a teacher!

Thank you for letting me be yours.

A Note from the Author

_________________________________________

We are our stories and the journeys we’ve had. We are made up of millions of moments filled with people, places, and experiences. This book is the story of all the things that have impacted my journey as a teacher and brought me from where I was to where I am. I give this account to understand where I have been, but also to help you have a better understanding of what I know to be true about kids, teaching, and education. I hope that in some meaningful way I can make your journey easier.

Of course my journey is not yours; you may be reading this in a different state, a different country, and probably a different era than the one during which I honed my craft as a teacher. Though the place, the journey, and the era may be different, I hope our goal has been the same: the search for excellence. Though I do not claim to have found it, I do know that excellence is the destination, and I believe the things that have happened to me can serve as signposts to you, to help you on your journey.

A career in education was never the journey I expected to take. I never expected that the things that happened to me, both good and bad, would happen.

I never imagined the kind of teacher I would become or the kind of classroom I would have.

I always knew I would be good at conveying information, but I never expected the kids to like me.

I never expected that I would care far more about my kids as people than the subject matter I taught.

I never expected any of this, but I am glad for the journey. I am grateful for what I have learned, and I can look back at the dark places and see how they lit my path toward the man I would become.

In the end, we are our stories, and this is mine.

William Quigley

Joy, Bliss, THIS

____________________________________________

My Journey

Endings, Beginnings, and the Ends of Beginnings

A Saint Named Leo Shows Me the Way

Teaching Internship: Good, Bad, and Ugly

Andrew Churns, Destroys, and Makes an Impact

A Rabbi, a Pastor, and a Clueless Teacher

The Infamous Letter Incident

Teaching in the Conch Republic

Respect Is the Key

This Is My Truth

Karen, a Stuffed Monkey, and the Story

The Specialness of Key Largo School

Monsters Both Real and Imagined

Accidentally Finding Home

What John Taught Me

The Year of the D

9/11/11

School for Sale

Your Journey

So You Want to Be a Great Teacher

Work on Yourself

Being the Best YOU

Work on the Class

Transcending Mediocrity

Work on the Work

The Right Tools for the Job

Teaching Is More than Testing

Learning Styles as Unique as Kids Are

Our Journey as Teachers

My Journey

_____________________

Endings, Beginnings, and the Ends of Beginnings _________________________________________

The day before winter break in 1993, a meeting took place in the office of my principal, Frankie St. James. Outside the sun was shining, a glorious winter day in South Florida. Inside, the atmosphere in the room was the opposite — cold and bleak. Attending the meeting were five people: the two teachers who had mentored me since August, the school’s two assistant principals, and the principal. All five were caring and dedicated educational professionals. All were people I greatly admired. Each was an excellent example of great teaching and leadership. All of them worked tirelessly inside the classroom and in the making of a school for the best interest of kids and teachers. I had turned to these dedicated coworkers when I needed advice and guidance. Each had cared about me and helped me, and had gone out of their way to assist me on my journey.

I was not present, but I was the subject of the meeting. They were discussing whether I should be fired.

And the truth is, I should have been.

I had been in almost every way possible a complete failure as a teacher, not just failing in the ways so many new teachers do but in completely new and novel ways.

I was boring. My lessons were dull. I lectured hour after droning hour and called it teaching. Kids fell asleep in my class or worse, they acted out, and honestly, when they did, how could I blame them? I didn’t have the skill or the ability to make my class the passionate and vital place it deserved to be. I was teaching block schedule classes which meant each period was nearly 90 minutes long; this coupled with no idea how to really engage and involve kids led to disaster.

I had no control, no classroom discipline. I didn’t have the faintest idea how to get a group of thirteen-year-olds to listen. Though my classroom was never chaos, it was also never really in control.

As an example of my lack of control, let me introduce you to one of my students. I will call her Karen. Karen had nothing but contempt for me. My class was so boring that she made her own excitement. She talked back; she yelled things out; she asked inappropriate questions. I responded in the best way I knew how, which was to confront, respond haltingly, answer shaking with anger, turn beet red, and challenge her in front of her peers.

These daily confrontations were some of the few times the class seemed to wake from their stupor and pay attention to what was happening.

Our school had an in-school suspension program, and whenever a student acted up, we teachers sent the student to this class. For several weeks straight I sent Karen out every single day. The ultimate example of my lack of ability to manage my class took place one day when I was going on and on about the settlement of the American West circa 1880. I had placed Karen in the back of the room and surrounded her with my very best male students. On this day, I noticed that the boys were all looking at her. I left my lectern and hurried over to where she sat. When I got there, she was sliding a pen in and out of her mouth making slurping, sucking sounds, and just as I approached, she looked at each of the boys and asked, Okay, who’s next?

Of course I threw her out of the class.

In each of my six classes, I had students who were like Karen: they ran the class, and I had no idea how to get them to stop. What is worse, the good kids were getting cheated out of an education.

As the meeting in my principal’s office progressed, all of my failures during the first half of the year were talked about openly. They hashed out each of the times and situations when administration had been alerted to my classroom failures. They were well aware of the number of times kids had been thrown out of my class. They knew all about my lack of control and how poor a job I was doing trying to control my classes.

My lack of control was only matched by the lack of quality teaching that was going on in my classroom.

There was another cloud, never mentioned, but it hung over every word spoken in the meeting that day. There had been other good reasons, since my first week of school, to wonder about my fitness as a teacher.

I am so glad those reasons weren’t discussed openly with me there, because I would have simply died, died, died if they had been.

I have always been self-critical to a fault. It would have crushed me to hear my own words presented to me as an accusation, to sit through the list of my professional failures, and to hear a litany of all the mistakes I had made. It would be several years later that I would be told about the meeting at all. And even though by then I had figured out how to do the things I had so readily failed at as a new teacher, I would grow red with embarrassment at the memory of that impotent time and my inability to do this job.

I should have been fired.

Five months of futility and a nearly complete lack of success had culminated two days prior with an event that led to this meeting to discuss my fate.

I was attending the middle school Holiday/Christmas band and choir performance. I had been a band student during my middle and high school years. To this day, my favorite school memories are of my time spent in marching and symphonic band. It was exciting to be on the other side, to sit in the audience, to be a teacher of the kids performing. The performance was everything middle school band is: a few squeaks, lots of sharp and flat notes, the sounds of young voices singing sweet familiar carols, and tons of proud parents.

In one of the last pieces the highest middle school band played, they featured each of the sections of the band, and when each section came up in the song, that part of the band stood up, played several bars, and received attention, applause, and happy parent smiles from the audience. The piece played on, with each group receiving their moment, and as the flute section got ready to play, one of the musicians got her foot caught on something and with a loud crash fell back hard into her chair. There was an audible gasp from the audience. The girl (we’ll call her Betty) was one of my students. Betty was like many middle school girls, self-conscious, growing into her body, very sweet, very quiet, and she turned bright red as her friends helped her up so they could play their feature piece.

Without any more disturbances, the band completed the performance, the chorus sang, and the night was filled with the sounds of Christmas.

As I mentioned earlier, the school was on a block schedule, which meant I taught eight classes but only saw four of them on any given day: one day I would see four, the next day I would see the remaining four and then the following day back to the first four and so on.

It so happened that the next day was Betty’s class. It was the last time I would see her before winter break.

It was a relaxing school day, with not a lot going on, and at the end of each class, I stood up to talk to the kids. I congratulated them on getting through the first half of the school year, telling them how much I appreciated all the work they had done and how good it had been to get to know them.

When it came to the end of Betty’s class, I started with my usual spiel about how the year had gone so far, but I decided at the end to deviate from my script:

This whole school year I expected you to fall down and fail, but I guess Betty did that for you last night. The moment the words left my mouth, I wanted to take them back. I looked at the class and then at Betty expecting them to laugh, but instead they gasped, and Betty’s face was turning brighter and brighter red. I gulped and started to speak again, stumbled and finished going through the usual goodbye blather that I had used in my other classes, and every time I looked over at Betty, I could see her getting more and more upset, a growing horrible look of utter and complete embarrassment suffusing her expression. As I was about to finish speaking, she stood up and ran from room. I was shocked, and I reacted by violating every rule of teaching by taking off after her. The bell had not rung, there were several minutes remaining of class time, but I left my students unsupervised and ran after her.

My classroom was in a portable at the back of the school, and as I came down the walkway from my portable, I saw Betty headed straight for the front office a few hundred feet away.

She got to the doors before me and threw them open just as the bell rang.

I entered the office lobby and looked around for her but all the visitor seats were unoccupied. I entered the swinging door that led to the back administrative offices. Room by room, office by office, I peeked in trying to find her. I can only imagine how crazed I must have looked to these people as I searched franticly for her.

As I got near the back of the building, I heard sounds of sniffling coming from the very end of the hall. I knew whose office this was, and what I heard next made my stomach drop with the worst dread I had ever felt as a teacher.

Oh, Auntie, he was so horrible. This was followed by another wrenching sob. Something was mumbled, and then the words I had said to her in class came out of this sweet child’s mouth.

I stopped dead in my tracks.

No one had to tell me how bad this was.

Until that moment, I had no idea I was teaching the principal’s niece. I did not know how thin the ice I was standing on was, but I could feel this coldness creep over me, this clammy coldness of just what a terrible thing I had done. I was in much more trouble than just one stupid cruel statement.

I walked in and opened my mouth to speak and to make the best apology I could, but one look from the principal told me it would be better if I just left, so I did. I turned and walked out without a word.

That afternoon, the meeting took place.

As the group talked, it became obvious that I had to go. I had made too many mistakes, and I needed to be fired. I needed to be gone.

But I wasn’t.

In the end, two things saved me. One of them was my own doing, but the other was not something I directly controlled.

As the meeting went on and all of my failures were put on the table, only one thing was said in my favor: from the moment I started teaching, I vowed to be good at it. Instinctively, I knew that to get better, I had to seek out people who could guide me, and I had done just that. At some point, I had asked everyone in that room for help. In little and big ways I had never stopped asking, pleading, imploring that I needed help figuring out how to do this job better.

I am certain that I drove my superiors crazy with my constant need for help and guidance. I had spent hours sitting with the very people in this meeting, the ones who would determine my fate as a teacher, listening to their advice, their stories, anything they were willing to share as to how they perfected their art. I went to workshops and sat there wanting to be as good as the presenters. When things went badly in my classroom, I didn’t hide from people with more experience than me; on the contrary, I sought them out, anyone with advice, anyone who could point me in the right direction, anyone who would listen. I tried everything they suggested with the hope that it would work. I was open, ready to be guided and taught.

For the first five years of my teaching career, I stumbled, bumbled, failed, and flailed. I was a failure. I was in the dark, bumping around knocking down chairs and desks, and worst of all, I knocked down some kids in the process. But — and this was the one thing that saved me — I constantly asked for help, over and over and over: Help me. I want to be better. I want to be good. I’ll do whatever you suggest, just please help me.

That attitude is what helped save me from being fired that day, but in the end, it isn’t what saved my teaching career. What did was when one of the two teachers who had mentored me spoke up and defended me in that meeting.

And here I will name Jeanne Kurth, because she deserves so much of the credit for me becoming the teacher I am today. I cannot sing Jeanne’s praises loudly, strongly, or long enough. When I was at the lowest points of my teaching career, she put out her hand and raised me up. She fought for me, defended me, spoke for me. If it weren’t for her, I would have left teaching, and I have no idea what would have become of me. A line from the movie Titanic does better to express what Jeanne did for me, far better than I could (with a slight pronoun change): You see, she saved me in every way a person can be saved. And she did. From the moment I met her till this day, I owe her everything. As you will see, her saving me was not just in that fateful meeting but in others sprinkled throughout my first year of teaching. When she spoke for me, she sent the message that I was salvageable, that they needed to give me a chance. Don’t fire him, she told them, and he will become a success.

Somehow, it was enough.

A Saint Named Leo Shows Me the Way _________________________________________

The ironic part of my journey is that I never aspired to be a teacher. I went to college specifically not to be a teacher. I thought anyone who taught for a living was wasting his or her time. Ever since I was a little kid, I had known — heck, everyone had known — that I was destined to be a lawyer, but not just any lawyer. I was going to work in law for a while to gain some experience, and then I would pull out the big guns: I would run for political office and win. Based on what the twenty-year-old me believed, I should be deciding right now whether to run for governor, the Senate, or the Presidency.

I loved to argue. I loved politics. I loved law. I loved history. I watched presidential debates the way people watch sporting events. One of the proudest days of my entire childhood was waking up early in March 1988, having turned eighteen the previous November, to vote in the presidential primary. This was the world I wanted, the adrenalin rush of politics, and all the power and status that comes with that world. I was ready to get out there and shake all kinds of dirty hands, and scratch your back if you scratched mine, as long as you gave me a leg up in politics, all for the benefit of society, of course.

Be a teacher? HAH! What a waste — a waste of an education, a waste of a life, a waste of talent. Besides, when you’re a teacher, who benefits? Kids like me who didn’t see the value in teaching. On top of that, I’d be poor, unknown, unimportant — the definition of everything that a well-lived American life is not supposed to be.

These were the reasons I told myself that I had no interest in being a teacher, but the real reason I resisted wouldn’t reveal itself until I finally walked into a classroom as a college student to learn how to be a teacher.

Just as I had always known what I wanted to do with my life, I also knew from a very young age where I would go to college.

I had for years dreamed of the College of William and Mary. This was Thomas Jefferson’s college, in stately Colonial Williamsburg, a place of brick, cobblestones, and ivy: the definition in my mind of what a college should look like. I researched the school and knew exactly what GPA they wanted in an incoming freshman, what SAT score I needed, and everything else that was required to get in. All throughout high school, I focused on this one college, and finally, after four years of hard dedicated work, I knew I was everything they wanted. I was so obsessed with William and Mary that when I started my senior year of high school, it was the only college I intended to apply to.

The day I sent off my college application, the future, my life, was set. I would be a William and Mary undergraduate, Ivy League for law school, and the White House sometime after that. Quigley 2008, or 2012, or 2016, or….

As I waited for William and Mary to send my acceptance letter, it never dawned on me for a moment that I wouldn’t get in.

One day, while I was shrouded in my certainty and going on and on about it, my mom came to speak with me about her doubts. She told me that my father and she were concerned. What if I wasn’t accepted at William and Mary? (My God, was that a possibility?) They had decided they wanted me to apply to a Florida college; they didn’t care which one, but I needed to apply to a college in-state. After resisting and telling her that she knew that the only college I wanted to go to was William and Mary, and that of course I was going to be accepted, I gave in.

Fine. Whatever. Who cares? I’ll apply to some Florida school to make my parents happy, but it doesn’t matter — I know what college I’m going to, and I know my future!

When I was a kid, there was no internet, and thus no quick and easy way to research colleges like we can do today. The only way to find out about schools and their requirements were books that described the profiles of colleges, and what they were looking for in the students they admitted.

So the next day I walked into my school’s library and asked the librarian if there was a book specifically of Florida colleges and universities. She said yes, pulled it down from the shelf, and gave it to me.

When I tell my students this story, they look at me with mild fascination, curiosity, and horror. To have to look up a college in a book, and not to be able to go to their website where you can see videos of what the college looks like, email students who go there, see pictures and testimonials on tons of chat websites — to them this is just too incredible to believe.

Now, how to do this, to pick a college I would not be attending? When I researched William and Mary, I had spent hours looking through books, reading everything I could get my hands on to make sure it was the right college for me. But this just felt like a waste of time.

And so, I didn’t even sit at a desk, I just put the book down and said to myself, Whatever page I open the book to, that’s the school I will apply to. Because who cares? I’m going to William and Mary. This is just to make my parents happy.

So I did just that.

I put the book on a tabletop.

I opened the book — to the page for Saint Leo College.

Never heard of it? Me neither!

But who cares? I was going to William and Mary. This was just to make my parents happy.

I wrote down the information, and when I got home, I quickly typed a letter saying I was interested in the school. They responded with some material I didn’t read, but I filled out the application without giving it much thought and mailed it to them

So I had applied to Saint Leo College. Where was it, anyway? Didn’t matter. Why? William and Mary. What kind of school was it? Didn’t matter. Why? William and Mary. What kind of degrees did it offer, was it public or private, how old was it, what was its history, how big was the campus, how many males attended, how many females, what were the dorms like, what traditions did they have? IT DIDN’T MATTER. Why? WILLIAM AND MARY!

To this day, I think Saint Leo knew I was applying even before I applied. It seemed to me that within a day of sending in the application, I got my acceptance letter.

But again, who cares? I was going to William and Mary. This was just to make my parents happy.

That’s when the phone calls started.

Saint Leo: Mr. Quigley, we would like to offer you a partial scholarship.

Me: Thank you very much, but I’m going to William and Mary.

A few days later . . .

Saint Leo: We would like to offer you a full scholarship.

Hmm . . . William and Mary, in Virginia, $30,000-plus for tuition . . . hmm.

Me: Thank you very much, but I’m going to William and Mary.

Saint Leo: How about room and board? We can offer you free room and board.

Hmm . . . William and Mary, in Virginia, $30,000-plus for tuition plus $15,000 for room and board every year for four years, that’s $200,000 . . . hmm.

Me: Thank you very much, but I’m going to William and Mary.

Saint Leo: And we can give you a job on campus.

Hmm . . . William and Mary, in Virginia, $30,000-plus for tuition and $15,000 for room and board for four years, that’s $200,000, and I don’t live in Virginia, so I would have to travel from Florida to Virginia each semester, and of course there are books and supplies, and then of course, eventually law school . . . hmm.

And most importantly, I have four siblings, and my parents had no money to help me pay for any of it, no matter where I ended up going to school.

It was right about this time that I got the letter from William and Mary.

It had become my habit to check the mail daily. When I opened the mailbox that afternoon, my heart stopped. There it was, embossed with the beautiful emblem of the vaunted College of William and Mary. Suddenly, I was terrified. Holding it in my hand, that letter felt like a precious and fragile life-changing gift.

I dumped the other mail onto the kitchen counter and walked into my bedroom clutching the letter. I sat down on my bed and tried to work up the courage to open it. What if they said no? My whole world and four years was in my hand.

At some point, the fear, hope, and anxiety got the best of me, and I just