Having been launched the same year as Sputnik, I have always been fascinated with space travel and exploration. As I grew, however, I realized that I would probably not explore the galaxy as an astronaut and meet aliens, but I could reach it through reading, writing, and studying. When I first entered school at Highland Elementary in the Riverview Gardens School District, I encountered a new life form: teachers. Who were these strange beings? How did they know so much? When would I know as much as they?

Passing from grade to grade and school to school, I began to admire teachers, those wonderful benevolent, intelligent aliens whom I thought had all the answers. In Mrs. Audrain's sixth grade at Lee Hamilton in the Ferguson-Florissant School District, I became fascinated with writing in general and poetry in particular. While most boys my age would rush home to play baseball or kick ball, I would lie on my bed, lost in a world of words and sound, and compose rhyming quatrains. I have been writing ever since. In seventh and eighth grades I wrote plays and stories. In Mrs. Murphy's ninth grade English class at Ferguson Middle School, I returned to poetry again.

I remember her leaning over my desk to read what I was writing. She would make positive comments and constructive suggestions. How wonderful it was to have an adult take an interest in what I was doing, to take it as seriously as I did. I have found that to be true of most of the teachers I have had. Teachers were so unlike other adults who never had the time or interest in what children were doing or thinking. I remember in the ninth grade we were asked what we wanted to be when we grew up. After very little time, I wrote down three careers: actor, professor of English literature, or a high school English teacher. I thought that any of these careers would bring me a rewarding life. Eventually, I combined all three as a high school English teacher.

As a junior at McCluer High School I began to explore the possibilities of working with people. I worked as a student aide at Lee Hamilton where some of my duties were tutoring small groups in reading, creative writing, and math. I vividly remember David, a young, angry boy who was having difficulty with reading. I was allowed to take him for a walk around the school yard to get to know him better. During that walk, he told me that he really liked birds because they were so free. When we returned to the building, we went to the library and picked out a book on birds for David to read. We struggled together with the words and eventually made it through his first book. David was delighted with himself, and I was hooked on the idea of teaching. Besides, I realized that there were innumerable challenges present on this planet.

I would say that the greatest contributions that I have made to education lie in the area of creating innovative and challenging curriculum both for the classroom and district through the Ferguson-Florissant Writers Project and co-authoring the Curriculum Guide for Composition with Judy Dowd of Berkeley High School and Larrilyn Lawrence the district's Reading/Language Arts Coordinator. Two of my greatest accomplishments would have to be founding and coordinating McCluer's annual festival of creative arts and having Starting From Scratch, an anthology of freshman poetry, for sale at Left Bank Books.