Epilogue: Three decades in local classrooms

Chris Miller, left, is shown with his daughter Jessica Miller Dixon and her friend Lauren Gantt at the Marion County Student Media Festival in 2011, where they were competing as Howard Middle School students. [Courtesy of Chris Miller]

It was 1992. Bill Clinton had just been elected president. Cell phones were still more sci-fi novelty than a pocket necessity. I sat in my graduate English education class in Norman Hall at the University of Florida, and our professor, Dr. Robert Wright, shared with the class the names of the schools we could request for our mandatory 10-week internships. Fort Clarke, Hawthorne, Gainesville Buchholz, and then, he said, there was a high school in the Ocala area that was prepared to receive three UF English teacher interns. He didn’t say the name of the school, but I’d seen the Ocala exits on I-75 South when I’d drive home to Tampa, so I knew it was a bit far from Gainesville, but not too far. Dr. Wright asked for volunteers for anyone interested in interning at the Ocala school, and I thought in that moment more like a business major—that interns at Gainesville practically grow on trees, but a UF intern in Ocala might have better opportunity to make an impression and graduate to employment if she or he did the job well.  

So, I raised my hand.  

Thirty-one years and a few thousand Marion County students later, I’m grateful that I jumped at the school whose name I didn’t yet know: Lake Weir High School.  

Interning 10 weeks in Mr. Hall’s sophomore English class was a crash course in the intensity and immediacy of navigating 25 to 35 minds simultaneously, each of whom is more likely to be experiencing thoughts of the argument with mom, the break-up with Brad, the comment Jen made in the hallway, or the zit on her nose than any fragile focus on “Cyrano whatever-his-name-is.” But they were necessary first steps, and just as babies don’t stand, walk, and run out of the womb, these first encounters with the comorbidities of apathy and enmity were brick and mortar for building a pit where the fires of teaching could grill steaks rather than char hearts. Well, that’s probably a clumsy metaphor, but it’s my novice approximation of the adage, “Pressure makes diamonds and bursts pipes.” That is, the pressure of life is coming, and most of your life’s direction will be the result of what you do with that pressure—will you burst pipes or make diamonds? As teachers, that pressure is coming in the form of a classroom full of eyes and words, and I think we’ve all landed on both ends of that continuum of what pressure can do—driving home replaying what we should have done because we feel we failed in that moment, or going home glowing, because we successfully actualized that magic transaction that I’d wager sparked most teachers’ choice of the profession to begin with—to help people. To nourish. To guide. To teach. 

So, it was 10 weeks of daily car-pooling with two fellow UF English interns to and from Lake Weir High School, and I learned a lot. I learned that the stoplight at Maricamp Road and 36th Avenue could stay red so long I thought it was broken. I learned that you can’t, from the back seat of the carpool leaving campus after school, flip the bird at a car behind you (“That’s a student, Chris—you can’t do that!  We’re teachers now!”). But most importantly, I began paying the deductible on the delicate-but-critical nuance of speaking with—not at—teenagers. 

Teachers are taught the best practices of the mechanics of teaching—wait time, proximity, crafting higher-order-thinking questions, but the more nebulous, ethereal aspects of teaching—building rapport, community, trust—are generally acquired via trial-and-error, and while your mileage may vary, you will still have to drive it to move it. Or to paraphrase our pedagogical prophet John Dewey, we learn to do by doing. Experience is the best teacher. 

I was fortunate that the assistant principal at Lake Weir High was Pam Stewart (who would years later become principal of Vanguard High and then the top education official in the state, Florida’s Commissioner of Education, from 2013 to 2019), who contacted Howard Middle School, where a seventh-grade language arts teacher was needed.

Chris Miller, second from right, is shown while being interviewed for a newspaper article circa 2000/2001. [Courtesy of Chris Miller]

I was hired at Howard Middle, so I moved to Ocala, and taught seventh-grade language arts three years there. But all the while, I hoped to get back to Lake Weir High School, as I learned that the high school mind was much more my speed than the middle school mind. Teaching is an annual arranged marriage, and I always found exciting but nerve-racking the first day of school, when you meet the 100+ kids who will be your co-pilots in the journey of the next nine months. And just as people who get divorced aren’t bad people—they’re just different and didn’t realize how different they were—likewise, there’s nothing “bad” about any level of teaching, but there is wisdom in knowing oneself well enough to know which age group a teacher can best understand and communicate with. Typically, teachers of high school kids bring an entirely different toolbox of efficacy than teachers of elementary-age kids. I suspect it’s rare that an effective high school teacher would be an equally effective second-grade teacher, and vice versa. Occupationally, mentally, and emotionally, different “languages” of instruction and interaction are needed—and although my Howard Middle days were formative and rewarding, I was happy to accept Mrs. Stewart’s offer to return to LWHS in 1996 to teach English, drama, and video production. 

I’d never taught drama. I’d never taken a drama class, even in high school. I think I was in a fourth-grade play in 1979 and wore a construction-paper tie, but that was the extent of my experience. And I’d never taught video production; in fact, when we would need to hook up the VCR at home, it was my wife who knew how to do it—not me. English I could teach, but as all teachers know, your first time through a new curriculum is always night-driving rather than day-driving. And for bonus points, my wife and I were expecting our first child, so I got special permission to keep a beeper on my belt all day every day in case baby Jessica made a move. I survived that first year, but if I had to choose a school year to never do again, it would probably be that one. It was just a case of not enough hours in the day and attempting daily to fit two gallons of water in a one-gallon jug.  

The next year, thankfully, my teaching assignment became solely the emerging program of video production, which I gladly embraced. A friend of mine who was the senior production coordinator at Fox-51/WOGX, Andy Davidyock, took a lot of time to help me understand the technical and creative aspects, and a colleague at LWHS, whom I had met during my internship and whom I always admired both for the breadth of his knowledge as well as his gift for cultivating a positive classroom culture, Tom Natalino, built us a control room and editing room within the double-classroom I’d been assigned.

And that began my 19 years teaching video production at Lake Weir High, as well as a few years of also teaching English. Video production offered dynamics that I enjoyed—not only was it project-based and an outlet for the kids’ and the school’s creativity, but students could take all four levels of the program, meaning we could build something: a real program, a culture, and in some ways a quasi-family. Education isn’t fashion, but it indeed sometimes travels trends, and mandates can come from the top down that sometimes feel/felt as if its authors were inadequately acquainted with the classroom. One of the buzzwords/buzzphrases years ago was “rigor and relevance.” It was a fine, memorable, and even alliterative motto that correctly reminds practitioners of instruction that lessons should engage learners with both high RPMs and a relatable understanding of why it matters. Years later, the word “relationships” was added to the recipe, which, more importantly than retaining the roar of the R alliteration, assigned deserving weight to what, to me, is the engine that makes education, society, and even families and life itself work or not work—relationships.  

Time for a brief digression. As I would tell my students—“Okay, goofy analogy time.” Years ago, I was annoyed with someone in traffic. It’s a problem of mine. Anyway, as the moron pulled up to the red light alongside me, I was eager to see what the face of utter stupidity looked like. I immediately realized it was an old friend. And just like that, I didn’t care at all about the traffic frustrations or harbor any malice. And it dawned on me that the power of a positive relationship can salve wounds with surprising facility. That our relationship was akin to a bank account of goodwill that was the result of years of deposits of kindness, laughs, and experiences, and that even with the “withdrawal” of a bad moment in the left lane, the account balance remained in good standing. That’s not to say that we are all relationship ledgers, but it is to say that the world is a different place when you’re with people you know care about you. And as teachers, we lay the groundwork for growing when we recognize students with specific, authentic praise that fortifies the good, and inoculates against the potentially problematic direction of the “bad.” When Caitlyn has her phone out and is “checking the time,” how a teacher deals with that says as much about the teacher as the student, and if there’s a pre-existing positive relationship that’s alive and well, whatever happens from there will be better than it would have been—if the “account” had been zero. 

So, all that to say that for those 19 years, I was teaching video production, but more importantly I was teaching kids. And that may sound like I’m tap-dancing in semantics, but I believe it’s truly a different idea. We accomplished many things in that time, broadcasting a morning program live every day, producing videos for competitions and local agencies/businesses, earning local, state, and national first places, but all of those endeavors were the vehicle—the vehicle for helping kids for the kids’ sake, not for the content’s sake. Yes, learning the material was the paramount objective on paper, but the actual and more important objective was and is the life skills that were integral to those tasks and that would translate to life’s present and future challenges. Teamwork. Time management. Deadlines. Grappling with complications.  Alchemizing failures into fuel. Grace. Compassion. Humor. 

Chris Miller, at right, poses with Lake Weir High School students, including his daughter Jessica, who was his student at the time, at the Marion County Student Media Festival in 2014. [Courtesy of Chris Miller]

The last four years of my time at LWHS, my baby Jessica attended school there and took all four years of my class. The fetus photo that I’d shown to my Lake Weir High drama class on an overhead projector in fall of 1996 was now walking its halls, attending my class, and gifting me a parallel poetry to my time there when she graduated in 2015. I was permitted to personally hand her her diploma, and then I left Lake Weir High School and teaching forever. 

Looking to do something very different but still with Marion County Schools, I became the dean of Ward-Highlands Elementary for the next two years. I wish I’d kept a journal of the many, many stories that would have strained credulity if I’d not experienced or witnessed them myself. Obviously, those can’t be shared, but suffice it to say that just as every police officer or bar bouncer has some crazy stories to tell, every dean and administration of every school everywhere is privy to and survivors of more drama, conflicts, and fireworks than I think people realize.

Since then, I have spent the last seven years of my career with Career & Technical Education, assigned to help CTE teachers at North Marion High School, North Marion Middle School, and Fort McCoy School. This was akin to a grandparental role in that I no longer dealt with students directly, but instead helped with the needs of teachers, who of course did deal directly with students. I was part of the team, but it no longer involved changing metaphorical dirty diapers.  

I shared my impending retirement last week on social media, and I confess it’s been a refreshing, reassuring experience to read former students’ comments and kindnesses, and to feel what I think we all want to feel as parents and/or teachers—that it mattered.

It mattered.

So, 31 years after my first class on a Monday morning at Howard Middle School, here I am at the end. In some ways, it’s a different world. Classrooms didn’t have email (most people didn’t have email) or phones, and there were no school or district websites. But in some ways, teaching’s nucleus remains the same. Teaching is of course academic, but also a mental and emotional ministry—we are proxy parents to lives and minds that need, in varying degrees, stability, security, a sense of belonging, humor, compassion, and boundaries that are fashioned from care, not power. Imparting concepts and an understanding of the coursework are the “job,” in the same myopic sense that a parent’s “job” is to keep a child alive—teaching and reaching and caring and guiding are so much more. It’s been an honor and privilege to know and serve the students and communities of Marion County.

I’m glad I raised my hand.