Continued from last time. This may be the second to last in the first half of this series, Notes Along the Way: My First Thirty Years.
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1. Somehow, I thought that a teaching job would be quickly forthcoming after finishing my doctorate at Durham. I was in for a rude awakening.
Up to that point, I was used to getting everything I applied for. So it was disappointing not to get that teaching job in Southampton. I foolishly passed up on the potential job in Manchester.
The Society of Biblical Literature does have a system of Openings, but I never even got an interview. I remember I applied to teach at the University of Louisiana. I thought, surely if I get an interview, I have a chance. Never happened.
I wanted to go on the Dunn path. Publish in Eerdmans. Write monograph after monograph.
I remember going to the 1995 SBL in Philadelphia. Be seen. Nothing. As a side note, I had a hint of an English accent after living in England for a couple years. Bill Patrick and I laughed at how a waitress seemed unusually interested until I confessed that I was only an American.
2. Welcome to a year of substitute teaching in Broward County, Florida. It was so bad that in the spring I would go to an African country in the middle of a civil war to get away.
If you knew me in the first thirty some years of my life, you might know that I had a very hard time saying no to anyone. In my first years of teaching, I annoyed the heck out of the responsible students by caving in to changing deadlines at the request of the more irresponsible students. You could almost always get credit on a quiz if you had a plausible reason for the wrong answer you put.
In England, I alienated a key friend by always saying yes to lesser friends when I had agreed to do something with him. Thinking he would overlook it, I would say yes to the latest request. Such was Ken the people pleaser. It was a major weakness of the first half of my life. If you try to make everyone happy, you usually end up with everyone upset with you.
I would say that the number one qualification of a good substitute teacher is the ability to manage a classroom. At this, you might guess, I was abysmal. A few moments stick out.
First, there was an opportunity to substitute teach virtually every day. The county stretched from Hollywood in the south to a fair bit north of where I lived in Wilton Manors. Every morning sometime between 6-7am I'd get that call. I'd groggily get up and drive to who knows where.
Most of the "opportunities" were middle school. These were the worst, but I accepted them all for the money. I think I might earn $50 a day, although it's hard to remember the exact number. Middle school is the worse because the young mind is just hitting formal operations. All sorts of new creative thoughts are now entering their minds, and they don't realize that we adults had those same thoughts 20-70 years earlier. (Of course, I suspect many a middle aged mind has forgotten their middle school antics.)
3. I remember one time I did a half-day in a portable. The teacher was actually there when I arrived. But as soon as he left, all mayhem broke out. I shouted at the top of my lungs, "THE ASSIGNMENT IS ON THE BOARD! IF YOU WANT A GRADE FOR THE DAY, DO IT! IF YOU WANT TO FAIL, THAT'S UP TO YOU!" I'm not sure anyone heard me.
I did Kindergarten music one day. How hard could that be? And they were watching a Disney movie!
Nope. They were endless motion. The movie meant nothing to them. I did my best, and it wasn't the worst day, but it was exhausting.
The worst experience was a day in the southwestern part of the county. Middle School. Portable. Last period of the day. I had survived, but I was trying to keep them from leaving the portable before the bell rang. There was this one kid determined to get out. I physically blocked him. Then I made the critical mistake. I physically held him to keep him from leaving.
He went crazy. Said he was going to go home and get a gun and come back. I wrote the referral and went home. He was expelled. I was never invited back.
4. As the year went by, I found that the jobs I enjoyed the most were the special needs classes or adult services classes, where there was always one or two other people in the room. I was always willing to help. It was just the behavior management I had trouble with.
I remember this one adult who had been a doctor but had driven into a canal and had gone long enough without oxygen that he had some significant brain damage. He was very high functioning. In fact, his IQ was probably average. But I sensed that he spent most of his days struggling to regain whatever he could of what he once had.
He inspired one of the dozens of novels I never finished. A University of Miami physics professor who had discovered a theory of everything. But he had a terrible accident one night and lost any real sense of what he had discovered. Meanwhile, a love story unfolds between his nurse -- a former student who we find out later had a child with him -- and the doctoral student desperate to unlock the secrets lost to his memory.
There was another young man who from birth had little of the cerebrum of a normal brain. He was mostly medulla and some cerebellum. Was he a person? I think we have to say he was.
5. My friend Bill Patrick and I drove to New Orleans for SBL that year. In typical Ken fashion, I said yes to a friend who wanted me to come do a Bible study with his small group in Atlanta on the way. Do you know how much extra driving that was? Bill would mock me for years.
It seemed to us that the reason for the invitation was that this friend wanted to impress a certain young woman in his group by inviting an up and coming scholar to come speak (me, in case you were wondering). But, at least it seemed to Bill, that she was far more interested in me than she was him. She came up afterward and said to me, "Sometimes I feel like there's a little theologian inside of me just wanting to come out."
Bill wouldn't let me forget that for years either.
Before we had left Florida, Bill had invited me to speak to a Sunday School class of his. I think though that they met on Thursday nights.
If you know Bill, this story won't surprise you. Bill graduated from Rollins College and would sun/swim at their pool regularly in Winter Park. (He also adjuncted for them for several years.) Guess who also used to swim at the Rollins College pool?
Mr. Rogers.
Bill invited Mr. Rogers to come hear me speak on Hebrews. And he came! I picked him up in my Chevy Citation. He rode in the front seat of my car. And he was, as you would expect, very complimentary.
He actually wrote a letter to the chair of the board at Princeton Seminary encouraging them to hire me. Of course board chairs don't decide such things. But it was a very nice thought.
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