Phil Wilson, AP English Teacher

It's weird how some things happen. In the space of the last several days, I've run into or been in contact with several of my former students from MLK, where I taught from 1994 to 2000. That student teacher bond is a strange one that can last for years and years. But here's the story of how I lived one of my teaching dreams. Warning: this will be a pretty long post.

After the 1996-1997 school year, the then-current Advanced Placement (AP) English at MLK moved to another school for reasons I won't go into here. At that point, I'd only been teaching for four years and thought that I might be considered a bit young to teach AP, but I thought that I would go to the administration and express my desire to take on the class. I was surprised when they said that they thought I would be a great teacher and lined me up to take some training on how to teach AP English. The training I got was EXCELLENT and it really prepared me to take on the class.

You see, I thought I was uniquely qualified to teach the course, because I'd taken AP English as a Senior at Hume-Fogg Academic, another magnet school here in Nashville. I was also considered a borderline student, a "project" if you will. And Mr. Kaplan, the AP teacher at HFA, told me as much. He told me that he wasn't sure that I could handle the workload, but he was willing to take a chance on me, and I was glad he did, as I got a 4 out of 5 on the exam (3 is passing) and it got me out of my complete freshman year of English at Lipscomb. Knowing that I was a borderline student, I knew that I could help encourage similar students at MLK and hopefully bring them up as well.

Now, MLK was going through a sea-change in its attitudes toward AP courses. In previous years, anyone who wanted to take an AP class could and in fact, before I started teaching AP, I had several students drop my Honors Senior class into AP, because they thought it was easier, and in some ways, it was. However, even if you took the class, you weren't required to take the AP test, a philosophy I disagreed with. I thought that if you took the class, you should take the test, otherwise, why take the class? The flip side of that coin was the idea of giving the student the experience of taking a college level class without the pressure of the exam. MLK was switching to the mindset of "if you take the class, you take the exam." I liked this and told my kids the first day of class that if they had no intention of taking the class, they needed to drop it right then, because we were focusing on preparing for the test in May. In fact, that first day, I put a countdown on my white board of the # of days until the test, just to remind the students of it.

In the first week of class, I gave the students a practice AP English exam. I'd gotten several from the training I took, which were invaluable. The AP English exam consists of two parts, or did back then: 1 section of multiple choice over several pieces of short literature, prose and poetry, and 1 section of 3 essays to be written in 2 hours. One essay was over a short poem, one was over a short prose piece (neither of which the students would have been likely to see before), and one "open-ended" where the students could use a book or books they'd read to answer a question. I knew most of my kids wouldn't have written that much before, so they needed to be trained to write an essay in 40 minutes, so we worked on that, a lot. And after we scored the preliminary essays, I told the kids that my goal for the year was to get them one score higher than where they were at the beginning of the year. So if they scored a 2 on the practice test, they should be able to get a 3 on the real one in the spring. And if they scored a 5 on it, then they should be very happy with themselves and not bother me too much.

Some people might complain that I was "teaching to the test," and that's true to some extent. But in a world where teachers are judged by what their children score on the tests they take, I was surely going to make sure they did well. We naturally covered a lot of literature, did some prerequisite vocabulary, and even did some fun stuff at several points in the year, like having the kids act out different Canterbury Tales (not the dirty ones, although we did read the Miller's Tale out loud in class). We read Macbeth and A Streetcar Named Desire, among other plays. They read Grendel and Catcher in the Rye, among many other novels. Every six weeks, we'd do a practice AP exam and score it and then go over the answers and why they put what they did. We covered the beauty of poetry, and unfortunately had to break it into parts to understand it for the test, although I think some of the kids started to see some of the beauty of it. For those three classes in those two years, they probably read and wrote more than they had in most of their lives. In February, we did a live practice test on a Saturday. They weren't required, but it was highly recommended. They took a multiple choice section for an hour, they took a break, and then they wrote three essays in two hours, their first real exposure to the rigors of an AP English test. And I had to score all of them. Every single one, plus their book journals, and their spring research papers.

But I loved it. I was teaching some of the smartest kids in Nashville about some of the greatest works of literature in the world. And it led to wonderful discussions. All of those things they told us in teacher orientation not to talk about, we talked about: sex, religion, politics, race. Because, guess what? That's what 18 year olds are interested in talking about! They were discussion where wide and varying viewpoints were brought out, and the kids were exposed to ideas that stretched beyond their own.

The other thing I loved what that, unlike my Honors classes, I didn't feel like it was me against the kids. They weren't trying to get through me to get to graduation. In my AP classes, it was us against the test. And I was the coach. They knew that I didn't want them to fail. That I didn't want them to be humiliated. So I was going to do everything I could to take care of them. To encourage them. To kick them in the butt if they needed that.

And at the end of that first year, 83% of my kids passed the AP English Exam. And at the end of the second year, 77% passed. Only one time in my teaching career was I prouder, but that's another story for another day.

And when my kids walked across the stage at TSU to get their diplomas, I was as proud as their parents were. I was watching kids I'd known since the eighth ('99) and seventh ('00) grade take a step toward adulthood.

Like I said, it's weird how things happen. I got an email from a former student telling me that I was responsible for her love of literature and writing. That's one of those irreplaceable feelings for me. That knowledge of sparking a love for literature. It's just... amazing.

Teaching is a special time of my life and honestly, it's hard to believe that I've been NOT teaching longer than I actually taught. In some ways, I still feel like that 28 year old guy when I get a hankering to pull a Faulkner book off the shelf, or want to take a dive into Henry IV, Part 1, even if I'm seven years beyond that now. Getting out of teaching has afforded me the opportunity for Sheryl to be home and be the primary caregiver to our kids. It's allowed me to expand my horizons beyond English into interface design and coding, but it's also shortened those horizons some too. I don't get to look into the eyes of the 18 year olds that I've taught and see the future. To see lives being formed. To see options and dreams and the wonder of life unbroken against experience. I see it in Kinsey some, but that's different too.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is Thank you. If you were one of my students, AP or not, thank you. Thank you for six incredible years. Thank you for being a part of my life every day of those years. And thanks for saying hi to me when you see me around town. It reminds me that "Yeah. I really was a pretty good teacher," and you all were some pretty great kids.

Thanks.