Teaching to Learn (4) to teach or not to teach

He opened it, gave me a key, and sure enough, to my great relief there were more than 40 copies of the exam - a multiple choice paper - in the top drawer of the file cabinet. I took one copy back to my dormitory, where a "smart" classmate made a cheat sheet with all the correct answers.

We carried the file cabinet back and at five o'clock in the morning I was walking up to my room and thinking, "Mission impossible accomplished!" - and I was feeling pretty good that I was so clever. But then I walked up the stairs, lay down in my bed and started weeping like a baby. 

Why didn't I ask for help? Because I didn't believe there was anybody out there who could teach me to read. This was my secret and I guarded that secret.

My teachers and my parents told me that people with college degrees get better jobs, they have better lives, and so that's what I believed. My motivation was to just get that piece of paper. Maybe by a prayer, maybe by a miracle I would one day learn to read.

So I graduated from college, and when I graduated there was a teacher shortage and I was offered a job. It was the most illogical thing you can imagine - I got out of the lion's cage and then I got back in to taunt the lion again.

Why did I go into teaching? Looking back it was crazy that I would do that. But I'd been through high school and college without getting caught - so being a teacher seemed a good place to hide. Nobody suspects a teacher of not knowing how to read.

I taught a lot of different things. I was an athletics coach. I taught social studies. I taught typing - I could copy-type at 65 words a minute but I didn't know what I was typing. I never wrote on a blackboard and there was no printed word in my classroom. We watched a lot of films and had a lot of discussions.

I remember how fearful I was. I couldn't even take the roll - I had to ask the students to pronounce their names so I could hear their names. And I always had two or three students who I identified early - the ones who could read and write best in the classroom - to help me. They were my teaching aides. They didn't suspect at all - you don't suspect the teacher.

One of my biggest fears was faculty meetings. We had them once a week and if the teachers were brainstorming the principal would call on somebody to get those ideas on to the board. I lived in fear that he would call on me, every week I was terrified, but I had a backup plan. If he had called on me I was going to get out of my chair and take two steps, grab my chest, drop to the floor and hope they called 911. Whatever it took not to get caught, and I never got caught.

Sometimes I felt like a good teacher - because I worked hard at it and I really cared about what I was doing - but I wasn't. It was wrong. I didn't belong in the classroom, I was trespassing. I wasn't supposed to be there and sometimes what I was doing made me physically sick, but I was trapped, I couldn't tell anybody.