Imagine you’re a special education teacher in a public school. You live on a farm in the middle of nowhere, far away from the classroom and it’s summer to boot. Yet, down the road pedals one of your students on a bicycle. He wants to chat.
What do you do?
Alright, now imagine you’re a Black engineer from British Guiana. You’ve just immigrated to London and are having some trouble landing a job. For the time being, you settle on teaching a class of underprivileged high schoolers on the East End. They don’t want to be there, and they don’t want you to be there either.
What do you do?
The first of these scenarios comes from the life of Elizabethtown College’s Assistant Director of Academic Advising Curtis Smith. The second situation is out of the life of Thackeray, the main character of a 1967 movie called “To Sir, With Love.” Thackeray is played by Sidney Poitier, an actor with such coursing charisma that he became the first Black man to win an Oscar three years earlier.
Curtis Smith is no Sidney Poitier. He’d be the first to admit it. In fact, he did admit, writing an essay literally called, “I’m No Sidney Poitier” which was picked up in “A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays,” earlier this month.
Smith explains that the Anthology’s compiler, essayist Randon Billings Noble collected essays which used unconventional forms.
Smith says, “My essay is considered a ‘braided essay’ because it weaves a couple different storylines and narratives together.”
What are the storylines being weaved? His essay interplays the relative simplicity of how Thackeray inspires and changes the lives of his students and (obvious spoilers) vice versa, with the challenges of real-life education.
Smith worked as a special learning teacher at Central Dauphin East High School in Harrisburg, Pa. for close to a quarter of a century until 2015.
“The majority of my career was spent in something called a resource room where my students were in the mainstream for the most part. So instead of going to study hall, they’d come see me,” he said.
Smith attributes watching “To Sir, With Love” as an eight-year-old as “a motivation for becoming a teacher.” It served as an early sign of his calling.
Smith and Thackeray’s situations are different, of course. Thackery had a single school year to make adults out of his rowdy classroom. Smith had four (and before Central Dauphin East Middle School split off from CD East High, he had a whopping six years to build connections with his students). Thackeray taught standard education while Smith taught special, though both served a relatively economically disadvantaged student body. Finally, Thackeray lived on the silver screen while Smith resides in a more confusing dimension called reality.
“I didn’t have [Sidney Poitier’s] charisma,” Smith said, “but I think there’s something to be said for the everyday steady work of a teacher.”
“A school needs all different folks. It needs the coach, and it needs the hard-ass and it needs guys like me who are more laid back,” he said.
Smith served at a time when American special education underwent radical change.
“Listen to grandpa,” Smith chuckled. “When I started, there were three [special learning teachers] for grades seven through 12. When I retired in 2015, we were just grades nine through 12 because the high school split, and I think there were 17 of us.”
He attributes this growth to increased understanding of what students require to succeed.
“We came to recognize other kinds of needs. The population grew and we also learned how to service them better,” he said.
Part of Smith appreciates the massive differences between teaching high school and teaching college first-year seminars.
He joked, “This is a great second act. Sometimes now I give my students a prompt and they do it and I think back to high school and think, ‘Oh my gosh, they’d be setting the room on fire.’”
But Smith is grateful for his time at Central Dauphin and for his students and their journeys.
He said, “The students I remember most were the ones who overcame.”
Smith’s final verdict of education?
“It’s not as exciting as the movie. It’s a lot of lunch duty and waiting for the copy machine to not be jammed anymore. But if you look at overall satisfaction, I can’t imagine a career that would have left me more fulfilled.”
