From the Pulpit to the Lectern

Three angels in my life directed me from one career choice to my being able to help young people develop their communication skills. But working closely with these young people also was cause for my fears. I desperately needed to discover myself, the man within.

Three angels in my life directed me from one career choice to my being able to help young people develop their comminication skills. But working with these young people also was cause for my fears. I desperately needed to discover myself, the man within. For forty years I interacted with high school teenagers as an English teacher, drama director, forensics coach, school counselor and with older students as a college professor. I can honestly say that throughout those years as an educator I am quite certain that I learned as much from my students as they learned from me. I entered my first classroom as a naive, insecure young man with immense fears of the "real" me being discovered and I left as a senior citizen comfortable with my life, my values, and most of all myself. It was the students in between those years, every one of them but especially a special few, who helped shape the man I was to become and it was the students, their parents, fellow coaches, and the men and women who taught next to me or down the hall from me who impacted me in such a way that I never dreamed possible when I first entered this career. In From the Pulpit to the Lectern I will introduce you to some of those students so that you can experience, as I have, the powerful bond that can exist between students and teachers, seeing not just how it shaped the students but how it shaped me, their teacher - the man with the educated chalk.

I received my BA degree from Heidelberg University in Tiffin, Ohio and my MEd from Bowling Green State University. I taught speech, drama, and English for 25 years at the high school level. During that time I coached the speech team and directed the plays.The last ten years before retirement I was a high school guidance counselor. After retirement, I taught public speaking for six years at the University of Cincinnati. During my tenure as a coach of the speech team many of my students won state championships in various events and qualified for the National Forensic League's National Tournament. In 1973, I was named Outstanding Speech Teacher by the Speech Communication Association of Ohio and in 1982 was elected into the Ohio High School Speech League's Coaches' Hall of Fame. During my teaching years, I served as chairperson of the Ohio High School Speech League's Exective Committee, chairperson of the Toledo District of the OHSSL, chairperson of the Western Ohio District of the National Forensic League, and was awarded the Double Diamond by the National Forensic League.