Before people were constantly available through cell phones, e-mail, SMS, and videoconferencing, it was often challenging to connect with someone during the workday. If you worked at a job that wasn’t at a desk, especially, phone message slips were how you knew someone was trying to reach you. People with phones at their desks had pads of these. When they received a call for someone who wasn’t available, they’d take the message, write the important details on one of these slips, and pass it along to that person. One that I received years ago is what’s pictured above.
In 1979, I was a maintenance mechanic at the Santa Cruz Sentinel newspaper (their logo is at the bottom of the slip). I didn’t have a mailbox where I received messages because I didn’t need one. Nobody called me at work. I’d worked in an office before I left that job to become a full-time student (and a full-time maintenance mechanic). So these slips weren’t foreign to me – they just weren’t something I received at this job. Maybe Debbie (whose initials are on the slip) waited for me to walk through the office and flagged me down to give me the message. Or she may have come to the basement where the shop was to hand the note to me since the caller was requesting a call-back within 15 minutes. Now years later, I can’t recall. However, this magenta piece of paper had enough impact that I kept it as a memento and just found it in a stored, forgotten box 45 years later. This message turned out to be the start of a very long journey that I couldn’t have anticipated or planned. That journey continues even now.
The caller was a high school principal I knew. I’d just completed the requirements for a bachelor’s degree in English the week before, and he was looking for somebody to fill in as a substitute English teacher for someone on maternity leave. As I later learned, although that teacher gave the school months of notice about her impending delivery, the principal hadn’t found a replacement. He was calling me on the Monday that made this teacher’s absence real because he had no teacher assigned to her classes. I returned the call and the principal asked me to come for an interview. I took time away from work that week for the interview and was offered the job. A week after the call, the Sentinel graciously allowed me to leave with no notice, and I was a high school English teacher. From that time forward until now and without interruption, I’ve been employed in education as a teacher, administrator, researcher, or consultant. That magenta slip of paper started it all.
In over 45 years since, I’ve had the privilege of connecting to thousands of lives. Education is about helping people build their dreams. I’ve worked in those 45 years in many roles, but at the core of all my work is the hope that one more person could build one more dream through my efforts. That’s an unparalleled privilege that educators have. This work has also given me the flexibility to evolve from a secondary English teacher into becoming a college instructor and later professor who prepared teachers, to being an administrator who helped shape institutions, to being a researcher and consultant whose work expanded beyond the impact that I had in one institution. It’s a gift that life has given me, and it began with that magenta piece of paper.
In reflecting on that message slip, I feel pretty good about my professional life. Yet there are evidently some who believe that I shouldn’t have been allowed to have it. My wife and I’ve always had dogs, not cats, and I identify as male; but the message from the Republican vice-presidential candidate is clear: If you don’t have children of your own, you don’t belong in education. Aside from his misogynistic targeting of women in his remarks, the senator is, I assume, telling all of us who haven’t reproduced to stay out of education. His premise seems to be that the experience of giving birth to and raising a child is a prerequisite to educating others. I don’t have children, so I must be one of those dangerous indoctrinators the senator suggests should be excluded from working in education. No one should’ve called me 45 years ago seeking to interview me for a job unless I had children or was willing to commit to having children.
Does the last sentence in the paragraph above read as weirdly as it was to write? As I think back on the thousands of students whose lives intersected mine, the programs I helped to build, the ideas I helped to develop and disseminate, the institutions I helped shape and continue to support, I wonder how they would differ if I weren’t there. I’m realistic about what I accomplished in each of these roles. I taught secondary students for fewer than 180 hours in a year, and college students even fewer. Given all else that happened in a person’s year, whatever impact I made was small. The colleges and universities I helped manage or with which I’ve consulted have taken ideas I helped create and have evolved them well beyond where I left them. And any article, book chapter, or book that I wrote has now become just one item in a long list of references in someone else’s writing. But all those small impacts exist. Whatever anyone believes about me or my work, that work would not have existed if I’d been excluded from education – if the principal from 45 years ago would’ve decided I was unqualified from consideration because of my parental status.
Governor Walz is right to label these kinds of ideas as “weird.” Until now, I’ve not had someone challenge my career choice because I wasn’t a parent. Actually, I’ve experienced the opposite as the people I’ve been honored to serve allow me into their lives as I celebrated their successes, counseled them through disappointments, attended their performances, participated their life milestone events, or shared their confidences. That doesn’t make me a parent. I didn’t walk the floor holding them as they struggled with whooping cough, or worry about whether they were getting the right nutrition as they grew, or stay up waiting for them after a late night. But many of my former students and former colleagues found a place in their lives for me, and I’ve found a place in my life for them. If I hadn’t returned that phone call 45 years ago, I wouldn’t have those connections. And that ability to connect with others, to share in their lives and they in mine, seems a much better metric of who should be in education. It’s definitely a better metric than a procreation test.
