Men's Stories

For this school year, Duane West has carried a lot of expectations. It's the price he pays for being the Riverview Gardens School District's 2006-2007 Teacher of the Year.

West hears comments and questions from parents, administrators and other teachers. Some ask about his teaching style, while others offer advice on his job.

My name is Daniel, I will be 14 years old in November. I worked at my mom's Daycare over the summer months as  a helper to the Educators working with the five year old age group.

My name is Craig Simpson. I am an Infant/Toddler Team leader at the Yawkey Konbit Kreyole Center for Early Education and Care in Dorchester, MA, USA. I am 62 years old. I have been working as an Early Childhood Teacher for over 30 years. My mother had been a Preschool teacher for 30 years. I grew up in a racially integrated preschool at the end of the 1940s in New Jersey. I didn't think I would be a teacher, even a day care teacher. I thought I would be an archeologist.

Wilburn Campbell's seen it all, the then and the now at Albany State University.

He remembers when Peace Hall was a condemned building ... when a city street ran through the middle of campus ... when "shotgun houses" were located at the southern end of the current campus ... when Caroline Hall was more than a symbolic chimney ... when the campus was inundated with the flood waters of the adjacent Flint River ...

A lot of stuff happens in 40 years.

I am a teacher. In 1972, I began my career teaching 5th- and 6th-grade social studies in the Midwest where, exactly 20 years before, I had started kindergarten. I was part of the Boomer generation that hit the schools in crushing numbers just after the war. From 1941 to 1945, many of our fathers were occupied with fighting the war in Europe and Asia. When they returned, they became occupied with families-making them. Like a junior Invasion of Normandy, wave after wave of 5-year-olds like me descended on the schools armed with crayons, Big Red tablets, and kindergarten nap mats.