Several months ago, I wrote about my fulfilled aspirations to become a professor. Now, I thought it’d be fun to take a short trip down resume lane and give an overview of the path that led to my position in higher education.
K-12 Substitute Teacher
In spring 2016, during my final semester at Old Dominion University for my BA in English, a certainty settled in me to pivot from fast food to substitute teaching. Knowing for years that I wanted to teach in higher education, I sought teaching experience. A three-year Chick-fil-A team member, I decided to work weekends only. During the week, I picked up jobs at Virginia Beach City Public Schools in elementary, middle, and high school classrooms, thus commencing my career in education.
High School English Tutor
That fall, I fell in with a testing administrator at Landstown High School, who liked me enough to take me on as a tutor for students struggling to pass their English SOL test. This gig became my full-time job, though I only worked 26 hours a week (the maximum I was allotted). Not many students utilized me, so often I’d write or read to pass the time.
Middle School English Tutor
In January, I moved to Richmond to be closer to my wife (then girlfriend), who was studying nursing at Virginia Commonwealth University. Through my alma mater, ODU, I secured an internship with the Virginia General Assembly, in which I spent many nights eating free food and drinking free booze at receptions held by lobbyists attempting to persuade legislators to pass favorable bills.
Two months passed in a flash, leaving me uncertain about next steps. Optimistic that I would be offered a position in Richmond by someone I met, I did not have a plan for work post-internship. Retreating to what I knew, I secured a tutoring job through a third-party company, Axiom Educators, and finished out the 2016-17 school year helping kids at Peabody Middle School learn how to pass their English SOL test.
10th Grade English Teacher
Part-time work had served me well, but I had progressed beyond it. Money was tight, but I also wanted to expand my education experience. Having substituted and tutored, the next logical progression was to teach the class. Instead of filling in like a babysitter or working one-on-one with students to pass a test, I could be the primary educator. If I was teaching, I could effectively provide knowledge and students might not need tutoring in the first place.
Irony is a great teacher.
Because my degree emphasized creative writing, not education, I lacked a Virginia Teaching License. Richmond Public Schools, however, needed teachers, and due to my bachelor’s degree in English, they were able to secure me a provisional license (a temporary, three-year license with requirements I must satisfy before the renewal date). In August 2017, I accepted my first teaching job at Armstrong High School, an inner-city school whose reputation often precedes it. I knew nothing of it.
I can’t say I taught much that year—though to keep moving upward, I spent evenings tutoring VCU’s athletes for college experience—but I showed up day after day, which some say was enough, and I made it through. By the end of the school year, I received the best news: I was accepted into ODU’s Master of Fine Arts (MFA) program for creative writing.
Writing Center Tutor
In my second year at ODU, I was offered an opportunity I had not received in my first, a highly desired two-part Graduate Teaching Assistantship. For the 2019-20 academic year, I tutored undergraduate and graduate students at ODU’s Writing Center, where I built on skills from my year as an Athletics Tutor. I tutored that summer, too, after which I was ready for part two.
English Composition Instructor
During the fall 2019 semester, I learned how to teach writing to first-year college students in a course entitled The Teaching of College Composition. In the 2020-21 academic year, I taught two sections of English Composition as an Instructor of Record, both as hybrid versions due to Covid, leaving me slightly unsatisfied, having not experienced a normal version of teaching. I graduated that spring.
The world had not yet reached normalcy, and my wife, who I had married in January 2020 just before the pandemic, had since passed her NCLEX and begun work as a registered nurse. In October 2021, after her cousin’s wedding in Boise, Idaho, my wife became a travel nurse, and I traveled with her to South Carolina to finish the novel I’d written as my MFA thesis.
SPED Teacher for English 11
After a year, my wife and I ended our spell as travelers, drove cross-country from Oregon to Virginia to settle down for a while. In April 2023, I applied and was offered part-time adjunct work at Richard Bland College (RBC). Instead, I decided to take an offer to work full-time at Manchester High School in Chesterfield County Public Schools, where I worked for the first time in special education in five English 11 classes, while I pursued my much overdue VA teaching license.
Over the summer, I passed the VCLA and Praxis tests. All that remained were four education courses. I enrolled as a non-degree seeking student at ODU and completed two classes in the fall and two in the spring. I now hold a Virginia Teaching License with an endorsement in English, which I have yet to use.
Instructor of English
When I declined the offer to adjunct at RBC because I needed full-time employment, I was informed that someone left the English Department to go to a university in New Orleans. I was told to look out for the job posting, and I did. That October, I was ready for it. I applied right away. I waited. I waited for months. I made plans to move to North Carolina. I forgot I had applied (or wrote it off as a dream unfulfilled), but at the end of March 2024, sitting at my desk at Manchester High, I received an email from Richard Bland to schedule an interview. I did fairly well, but I was uncertain. Then I received an invitation for an in-person campus visit interview.
Apart from the fact that I grew up just three miles from RBC and had family that went there, I got a good feeling from the school. Quiet, remote, a place I could not only grow as a teacher and a writer, but where I could see the direct impact I was making on students. I accepted. I am now coming to the end of my first semester teaching four introductory English courses. I will teach five next semester, and I have submitted a proposal to teach Introduction to Creative Writing in the fall of 2025.
Reflections
This trajectory is imperfect, but it allowed me to see the full scope of our educational system. While doubt clouded my vision from time to time, I saw clarity in my ideal position as college professor. Detours added valuable life experience as a writer, which remains my primary aspiration. In many ways it doesn’t matter that I took side streets, long rides across the country, or long flights to foreign lands. I have, for the most part, stayed the course, fixed on the greatest profession to pair with the life of a writer.
Education has been my aim because I want to be a good influence on people. Ideas matter, thought is essential, and developing one’s writing is a means of refining one’s ideas and thoughts. There is great power in words. As a college professor, I can feel that power growing in me, as it has through the years of my professional life, allowing me to show the way, to influence in such a way that students will see real benefit, real change in their lives, to show them that the power is within them and they may one word, one sentence at a time, learn to cultivate it, craft it, and create for themselves a meaningful life.
