I tell people that I come from a “disciplinary” background, which is just a succinct way to say that I transitioned to K-12 teaching from a PhD environment. It’s definitely not unheard of, and if you quickly scan Waterford’s faculty profiles on our website you’ll see that there are plenty of people with this background at the school, but for me making the transition to secondary school was sort of a huge leap of faith. Initially, when I was being interviewed for a position with the school, I thought I’d primarily be teaching high school, but I gave a teaching demo to 8th graders (over Zoom, this was during the tail end of COVID) and later discovered that I would mostly be teaching 8th grade. One can imagine how different teaching middle school is from teaching college, especially at an Ivy League college. I was sort of terrified. Universities are not great at equipping graduate students and professors with pedagogy and classroom management, both of which are crucial if one is to survive and thrive as a teacher in secondary schools. In fact, good teaching, as I discovered in the course of my PhD and brief period of job searching in academia, is not really something that is valued at the post-secondary level where research and “advancing the field” are priorities. So I wasn’t really sure I would be any good at all if I chose to leave academia and teach in this setting.
So one question that is worth asking is why I took that leap of faith and came to Waterford. Well, I think that I have just always had a passion for teaching, and after many, many years of studying specific slices of history I think I was excited about the prospect of being able to explore other periods of history with students who had an untamed curiosity for everything, not just the subjects that were necessary for their material success in their chosen careers. Aside from that, I knew pretty much immediately that my colleagues would be amazing and Utah is a bit closer to home than anywhere on the East Coast. I didn’t get a chance to visit campus before accepting my offer, but had I visited campus I also would have been blown away by how scenic and bucolic it is here. Even today when I make the commute to school I am often awestruck as I drive east towards the Wasatch front and occasionally catch a spectacular sunrise view. As someone from Oklahoma, It’s a view that I never get tired of seeing.
As for the transitioning part… It’s been about as difficult as I expected. Especially in my first year, I just didn’t feel equipped to deal with many of the things I had to deal with. I’m not sure making a transition to secondary school teaching is easy anywhere, but things have gotten better every year and I attribute that to the availability of mentors and colleagues here at the school. Our chair in the History Department is incredible and I routinely rely on his wisdom whenever I have questions or doubts about my own work. Likewise, I have colleagues in the department who have a lot of experience in education at this point, both within public and private secondary schools and inside and outside of Waterford. I am very grateful to be able to borrow and learn from their experience so I don’t have to constantly reinvent the wheel with my teaching. Waterford has also implemented a more rigorous teaching coaching and mentoring program since I was first hired. While this program mostly spun up after my first year, it’s been a really valuable and rewarding experience working with the coaches to improve certain aspects of my teaching and simply have someone listen to my teaching problems as I am having them. All of the above is something that I really wished I had in graduate school as I was cutting my teeth teaching at the post-secondary level. Beyond mentor and colleague support, over time I have also come to develop my own style of teaching, and as one gets more comfortable with who they are as a teacher many of the daily anxieties of working with challenging students start to dissipate at least until a completely novel challenge shows up. That doesn’t mean that every day is smooth sailing, or that there still isn’t room for improvement, but I now feel much more capable than I did in my first year of teaching here.
Part of “developing my own style” has been leaning into my own educational background to design and prepare my classes. Waterford gives us a lot of freedom to plan the curriculum and in fact this is probably the part of the job that I enjoy the most. My first year we taught 8th grade mostly from a textbook but over time the 8th grade team has transitioned to course readers that are built around actual primary sources from the ancient and medieval world and I’ve had the opportunity to use my background to help build out these readers. It’s a very interesting challenge to find real sources and make them engaging and understandable for middle schoolers. Those of us on the disciplinary specialist side have to work closely with colleagues who have a lot of experience teaching at this level to find the right balance between presenting sources authentically and altering them to make them more approachable. In any case, the result is that students here, even in middle school, are doing work that historians do in the real world. We’ve brought in lecturers from Princeton to visit the school and they have come to see 8th grade classes. They have reported that students are basically reading what they read in college courses on the same topics. So though I don’t spend my days researching the small historical territory I focused on in graduate school, I would say I routinely use and apply the skills I learned in graduate school to improve the quality of instructional materials I use in my classes and it’s led me to have a lot of pride and satisfaction in my work.
To close with some reflection on the students here and Waterford, and how they have met my expectations. It is indeed the case that there are students here with untamed curiosity. They can get excited, often too excited, about pretty much anything. Those who develop a real passion and interest in history are very rewarding to work with, though there are certainly a fair number of students who don’t see themselves as “history people.” But part of the joy of teaching here is being able to see students in all their different settings—students who might not on the surface appear to be interested in history are often found expressing that interest in history through other subjects whether it is in ceramics, music, dance, English, or Latin class. Likewise, I have students who might fall asleep thinking about early historical disputes between Christians and Muslims in the medieval period, but they wake up when we start to talk about Sufi dance practices. And because our program encourages us to teach both Middle and Upper school, you get to see these students develop over many years and you can often be surprised by who they’ve become in just the few years since you last taught them. Maybe you weren’t able to reach that one student in 8th grade, but in 9th grade, they had a different history teacher that found the right angle for them, and by the time you see them in 10th or 12th grade they’ve not only developed a genuine passion for history, they’ve started to see that history is not just something you study in school, it’s a way of connecting with the rest of humanity, past and present. As an educator, it’s very energizing to see students transformed by what they have learned and it’s certainly one of the best things about teaching here at Waterford.