You have been teaching at Four Corners Upper School for 9 years now. Why, after all this time being at FCUS, did you decide to leave and teach at a Catholic School?
“So, I’m the happiest I’ve ever been in my life, teaching at Four Corners Upper School. I could have easily stayed here for the rest of my career and continued to enjoy every minute of it. But over the past few years, there’s been one thing, one idea in the back of my mind that eventually I couldn’t ignore anymore, and that was the feeling that I was called to explore Catholic education. I’ve always been very careful in my classes here when it comes to religion, when it comes to politics, to keep my views out of it for the most part. You probably heard me a thousand times say, ’Ask me after you graduate.’
But I am a human being with my own personal experience and my own personal life, though I don’t claim to be a great example of one, my Christian faith is an important part of that. From that perspective, in my classes I’ve always tried to emphasize how all these varied subjects, as I teach so many things, are connected, how all these fields of knowledge are connected, and how the real purpose of all of this is to make each of you students the best version of yourself that you can be, and to flourish, to grow in a life a virtue and that I’ve always tried to emphasize. The added demention that my faith perspective brings to that is that the ultimate exemplar of what it is to live a flourishing virtuous human life is Christ, and so to teach in an environment where that’s no longer the quiet part in the back of my mind, but that becomes the explicit goal that we can integrate into the experience of education, is something that excites me and was appealing enough to draw me to explore it.
My expiration didn’t last very long before I had a firm offer from a school that I felt like I needed to take, a big part of the reason I needed to take it now is because I’m almost fifty years old and so if I’m going to experiment with something new, especially something new that might not work out and where I might have to put the pieces back together again, I don’t want to be doing that when I’m almost sixty or when I’m almost seventy. So, if I was going to answer the question for myself, it was pretty much now or never,” Cambridge teacher Jeff Childers said.
Do you think it will be hard to leave your teaching position in FCUS?
“Yes, so I’m a human being with emotional attachments to this place, to the memories in this place, most importantly to the people in this place. So, while I’m excited, I’m also very sad, and I’m full speed ahead in what did I just do mode? Did I just blow up my life? I don’t think the answer to that is yes. I’m not worried about my ability to be successful in the new school environment. But you know I’m known by everyone here, even the ones who don’t know me but know me by reputation. Walking in to some place where the students haven’t been hearing about my classes for years since they were in sixth grade, where there are no pictures on walls that students have been drawing for me, so I’m nervous about that, but it’s just going to be different and I will have to build that foundation all over again and hope and pray that I would be able to do that.
Another student was interviewing me for a different project and asking all sorts of questions like favorite memory of this, favorite experience of that, and as that was going on and I was digging through all these memories, I was becoming so sad, sad enough to really second guess the decision I’ve made. But then all of a sudden it hit me, all these memories of people I’m sad to leave, most of them have been gone for years, there are people here now who I’m sad to leave, but they’ll be gone in a year or two years. So, to stay because of the memories, I don’t know if that would be the best decision,” Childers said.
