Cam Scott: Teaching Public School During Covid-19
I’m a firm believer we are only good as the people we have around us, which is why serving one’s community is essential. Now, here I am with one of the best jobs I can imagine.
Cameron Scott holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Arizona, is a fly-fishing guide and teaches 7th-12th grade English Language Arts.
Finding a home and a career
"Fly Fishing _ET5A7594" by Intermountain Region US Forest Service is marked with CC PDM 1.0
In my twenties, I swore I’d never be a public school teacher. Partially, it was because of education fatigue: I’d made it through undergraduate and graduate school only to enroll in a post-bachelors degree program for teaching and drop out after the first few weeks. If I was lying, I’d put more of the blame on my unease sitting in class with undergraduates while coloring pictures of home and talking about where I was from was torture. But the truth of it – the real honest truth, was that the thought of teaching for five days a week and using weekends to grade and plan curriculum made me break out in a cold sweat.
Salaried jobs: cold sweat.
Long workdays: cold sweat.
Living simply with plenty of time for writing and fishing: no sweat.
As my twenties went by, my avoidance of public school teaching continued. I held down jobs as varied as summer camp directing to assembling video poker machines, residence life managing to hydroseeding, non-profiteering to cleaning outhouses. As the years passed, I still swore I’d never be a public school teacher. I spent all of my time writing, fly-fishing, and teaching writing. But teaching full-time at a public school?
I felt like Rilke’s panther pacing its cage just at the thought.
A dog on a short leash in a world full of squirrels.
A falcon tethered to a leather jerkin wanting to break free from the falconer.
Drifting from job to job, or back to the same seasonal job year after year, it wasn’t until my mid-thirties when I finally found home. There are few other places than the large eastern Oregon county with a small population where I live that I would rather be. I ended up here for a non-profit teaching gig. First for three months, then for longer. Temporary became permanent sooner than I thought – first signaled by me buying my first house in a town of less than eight hundred people.
What makes home so special
"Plains of eastern Oregon with the Blue Mountains" by Bonnie Moreland (free images) is marked with CC PDM 1.0
My home had its ups and downs. I spent winters teaching and steelhead fishing and summers guiding in other states, but Oregon was the only state I called home. One winter between grants, I found myself installing sub-flooring in zero degree weather, righting doors, caulking cracks, all the while looking ahead to the next year when I’d get to once again work in local classrooms. Still, the “ups” were always on the horizon. Whether teaching or hammering nails, there were steelhead returning, and I would return each fall for the steelhead, spending longer and longer parts of the year in Oregon, until finally one summer, I just didn’t leave.
It occurred to me, just over the hill of forty, that the thing I was really good at, that was more worthwhile than most anything else in life (except for maybe fishing or writing) was serving local kids through teaching. And, guess what lined up with my values best? Teaching at a public school.
To become a public school teacher at forty-two was no mere feat (becoming a public school teacher at any age is pretty amazing). I applied for an emergency teaching position as a 7th-12th grade English Language Arts (ELA) teacher and landed it. I enrolled late in a Masters of Arts in Teaching (MAT) program and snuck in just before classes started. Unlike my younger years – where I might have dropped out at the thought of all the hours I was about to spend with my butt planted on a seat typing over one hundred thousand Grammarly-checked words, I instead launched like a rocket, boosted on fuel, fear, and hot blue flame, through hoop after hoop as I checked one box off after another. What once would have made me break out into a cold sweat and run the other direction, I brushed off. What once would have made me feel overwhelmed, I laughed at, or laughed at myself over.
Making it through teaching my first year on top of taking a full class load is mostly due to where I live and who I live with. I persisted thanks to deer hunting, elk hunting, steelhead fishing, and morel hunting with my friends and wife. And, thanks to various communities including my fellow cohorts in the MAT program and staff at my small school, I didn’t implode. I’m a firm believer we are only good as the people we have around us, which is why serving one’s community is essential. Now, here I am with one of the best jobs I can imagine.
Even in the midst of Covid-19, I’m finding this year is a lot like last year: challenging, but with a clearly charted course driven by a district-wide ‘students-first’ mentality. I’m proud of my district as we have made it through our first month of having students in-class along with a hybrid online model couched in our classrooms where, when a student is sick, they attend from home if they are able.
New procedures like staying six feet apart, wearing masks, sanitizing our rooms: check.
Supporting all of our students’ social and emotional needs through standards based and interest based curriculum: check.
It isn’t easy, but then, good things in life rarely are. My only hope, really, is that we all make it through Covid-19 this school year even more certain that what we do as a school district within our community matters. Students, teachers, staff, families, this Oregon shout-out is for you.