David: So when you were teaching, you were very young. You were only about twenty-five years of age. The kids that you were actually in class with, teaching, weren't much younger than you. What were they like? Did they respect you, did they think of you as a peer, or did they think of you as someone that was owed respect?
Richard: That's true. Some of the students were only four or five years younger than I was, but it was never a problem. I was the teacher and they were the students in those days, because I started teaching in 1965. We had a great relationship, and I never had any problems with the age difference.
David: You started teaching in 1965, and of course you taught through-from the mid- into the late sixties. Did you see a change in the culture happening, in the attitudes of children and teens at that time?
Richard: People often ask me this: "Were the kids different in the sixties or the seventies?" I can honestly say I thought most of the kids I thought were respectful of teachers and I never really found that much of a difference from the kids that I started teaching in 1965 or the kids I taught in 1985. Kids are kids, regardless of the times.
David: When you were preparing to be a teacher, and you started teaching, what sort of expectations did you have about being a teacher, compared to what you found out was the reality of teaching? Anything surprise you about that?
Richard: Yes. It wasn't quite what I expected, in spite of my practicums. When I actually started teaching full time, I found that I spent fifty to sixty percent of my time in the classroom just in disciplining students and classroom control, and getting people on task. There was always someone in the class who had a problem that had to be dealt with. It didn't matter what time of the day, or which class it was, but that's what I didn't expect when I went into teaching, that I'd spend so much time organizing the class and getting them ready to learn. David: What about disciplining the kids? Did you ever have to show who's boss in the classroom? Richard: Yeah, sometimes there were times when a showdown was necessary and I had to exercise my power. But over the years, I got better and better at it. Just with a few words, I could smooth many struggles over easily. It took time for me to learn this, but I learned that you didn't have to yell and shout; just a few well-chosen words would do the trick. David: Anything unusual happen while you were teaching?
Richard: Yes, in 1977, it was a Saturday morning, 2 a.m. I got a call from a friend of mine who I used to teach with. He phoned me and he said, "Richard," he said, "They burned it down." I said, "What do you mean, they burned your house down?" He said, "No, no, they burned the school down!" And sure enough, that morning I drove to my school and the school was just all in ashes. A young lady had taken out some of her hostilities and had set fire to the school, not meaning to burn the whole school down. It was so hot that firemen had troubles even standing on the road to fight the fire. Nothing remained but ashes, steel lockers, and filing cabinets. That was it.
David: So teaching is something that's exceptionally well-respected, and there's all kinds of people that want to go into teaching, and everybody is-in a sense-a teacher themselves. Everybody wants to give their opinion. Would you advise someone to go into education to become a teacher?
Richard: Well, there's a lot of work involved. If you're going to go into teaching, you have to be prepared not to just put in the five or six hours during the day actually teaching, but there's things like supervision at lunchtime, after school, and most nights there's homework, marking, preparing. So, you're going to be a busy person, but you never want to forget that in the summer, there's two months where you can just do nothing. David: Thanks a lot. Thanks for talking with me.
Richard: My pleasure.
