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- [Craig] During his 41 year career, Eric Stemle called his classroom, his garden, but what part of the garden was a metaphor for him as a Wyoming teacher?

He was the stem, the conduit, the foundation rooted in soil delivering water and nutrients to the pedals, his students.

His book, "I Was Not the Blossom," chronicles his final year of teaching.

Former teacher and author Eric Stemle next, on Wyoming Chronicle.

(dramatic music) - [Announcer] This program was funded in part by a grant for Newman's Own Foundation.

Working to nourish the common good by donating all profits from Newman's Own food and beverage products to charitable organizations that seek to make the world a better place.

More information is available at Newmanownfoundation.org.

Funding for this program is made possible in part by the Wyoming Humanities Council, helping Wyoming take a closer look at life through the humanities, thinkwy.org, and by the members of the Wyoming PBS Foundation.

Thank you for your support.

- Good evening, and welcome to Wyoming Chronicle.

I'm Craig Blumenshine from Wyoming PBS, and it's our pleasure to be joined by long time Wyoming teacher and now author, Eric Stemle from Evanston tonight.

Eric, welcome to Wyoming Chronicle.

- Thank you, and thank you for inviting me, Craig.

- You're sure welcome.

Eric, you've had a wonderful teaching career.

You also now have written a fascinating book about your experience and more specifically about your experience in your last year of teaching.

"I Was Not the Blossom: "Growing Up with Your Students "in a Nurturing Classroom" is the title of the book that you've written.

And I want to give all the attention that we possibly can to that here in just a minute, but take us back, Eric, to maybe your childhood.

You were born in Indiana, raised in Ohio.

Self-described not that interested as a high school student, if I remember your introductory remarks in the book correctly.

- Yeah, I didn't work as hard as some of my students did when I taught them.

I can say I had a lot of other interests, and I never really saw myself in college.

- And you went to Michigan State for your undergraduate work.

But even, you write, when you went to college you weren't sure what you wanted to do.

Maybe a journalist, maybe be a novelist.

And all of the sudden you had this idea to be a teacher, and a professor kind of encouraged you to do that, but said you really have to want to do it.

And then you had a big fib, right?

- Right, I said, okay I'll teach because I thought going into English would give me a chance to pursue writing as a career.

And my advisor asked me what I planned to do while I was writing, how's it going to earn money.

And I had no idea.

I didn't realize that authors had to earn money on the side when they're starting out.

And so I asked her about some options and one of the options that she threw out there was teaching.

And I said, yeah, I could teach.

And she leaned back and she was said, you can't just teach.

You have to want to teach.

And that's where I told a lie.

And I said, I want to teach, I do.

And then I got into my education classes and started working with kids, and I realized it was the best lie I ever told them.

But probably the most important thing that happened in student teaching is that I met my future life, Theresa.

- She was a music ed major.

Is that correct?

- Correct.

- And there was, you then became a teacher, but there was a time you moved to Green River first.

What caused the move to Wyoming?

- You know, we got jobs, our first jobs were on the Navajo Nation, and we were there for a year.

I taught at a community college and she taught at a elementary school.

And it was a really good experience.

We went back to Michigan and worked on our master's degrees, and we taught there.

She taught in a small district that failed its millage election and just axed the music program.

So she had no job.

Since we'd lived out west, we decided that maybe we could go back and try again.

And so we found jobs in Green River, and we were there for 18, 19 years.

- And then matriculated to Evanston.

You've had a 41 year career of teaching.

You retired in 2017.

Your, I think, style of teaching had to evolve over time.

Take our viewers through that process briefly.

And then I really want to get into your book, your reasons behind the book, and a lot about what you write in your last year of teaching.

- I had a cutting edge education experience at Michigan State.

The English department in the '70s was maybe the best in the country and were bringing in amazing people to work with us.

And we were really working hard on the creative aspects of it.

So I came in, my first teaching jobs, I really did want to do things in a student centered approach, but I still had that kind of fall back to my Catholic school days when I was a kid.

I taught in rows for a long time, 'cause that was a lot easier to do.

And then when I finally got to Green River High School in the mid '80s I got to the high school, and I saw one of my friends with her seats in a circle.

And I thought I did that in high school.

My teachers had, back in East Lansing, had us sit in a circle, I think I'll try that too.

And that stayed that way for the rest of us my career.

- And I never got a chance to see you teach, unfortunately.

I think if our viewers maybe want to understand what you may have been like as a teacher is Dead Poets Society, where they should go look?

Is Robin Williams, you in many ways?

- Yeah, and I'm by no means comparing myself to Mr. Williams, but I really used that movie as an inspiration a lot of times.

Especially when things really need to be jazzed up a little bit.

And it inspired me to try things and to be a little bit more energetic with my kids.

- Eric, before you started really writing your book, you started writing about teaching in a blog.

Why did you want to do that?

Why did you want to share your day with others in such a public way?

- My responsibilities from the mid '80s on was professional development for my districts.

For the last 25 years of my teaching, I taught half-time with students and half time with teachers and I would consult with them.

And so late in my career, I looked at technology and decided that there was a way to kind of build those relationships with teachers beyond consulting in their classrooms or having them take classes with me.

And so I started blogging at the end of every class, just because I wanted to have a platform for conversations and jumpstart those dialogues with my friends.

And this is what I'm doing in class.

What are you doing in class?

How's that working?

What questions do you have?

It went nowhere.

And so I put it out into the ether and one or two teachers would comment.

And every once in a while someone say, hey, I'm I'm reading your blog just so you know, but it really wasn't hitting what I intended.

And I had a good friend from high school who suggested that I might migrate my blog to Facebook, reach more people that way.

And so that last year of my teaching, that's what I did.

And oh my gosh, suddenly I was hearing from students from the '80s and the '90s, and it really opened up the dialogue like I wanted.

- So let's talk about your book, Eric.

You use the metaphor of a garden.

As we said in the open to the show, you weren't the blossom.

In fact, you were the stem.

Explain the metaphor to us a little bit.

And then I want to really get into to your book, some of your blog entries that I really enjoyed, and I want to try to communicate as best I can what type of teacher you were.

So tell us about the title.

What does it mean?

- Well, the idea of a classroom was a garden did not originate with me, that's for sure.

But I always saw my teaching as organic.

And so when I put together the book, I took the foundation of that year of blogging and I wrote a commentary for each one.

And that's sort of tied in my career and also tied in the profession in general.

But I wanted a controlling metaphor.

And so I thought of the garden and I started talking about what a gardener does.

He prepares the soil, he plants the seed.

And then I thought, no, it's more than that because I wasn't just a teacher who wanted to be standing up in front of my class.

I sat in the circle with them and they were as much in charge of our discussions as I was.

And so then I took the metaphor down to the flower level.

And I tried to think of, you know, what part I played and truly when people visited our classroom, what I wanted them to see was the beauty of my students.

And a lot of times they came to watch me because that was part of the evaluation system or they were visiting and that was something they wanted to observe.

But really the focus had to be on those beautiful blossoms.

So I thought, well, if I'm taking this metaphor out, I'm not the blossom because I was not the blossom.

It's the kids.

And I wasn't really the roots.

And I thought, well, what connects those two is the stem.

- You were an English teacher and I imagined myself walking into your class on the first day, you're directly interacting with me on that first day.

You write very seriously about how important those first experiences are with your students.

- Sure.

- Tell me more about that.

- Well, first day is critically important because kids are going to be coming in with, a lot of times with some trepidation and not really knowing where we're headed as they start.

They want to check out this guy, you know, in front of the room.

So the first thing I wanted to do when the kids came in the class the first day was meet them at the door.

Shake their hands, introduce myself, and just say welcome to class.

And sometimes I had to grab kids when they went by and pull them back because they just didn't catch on to what I was doing.

But we met, made a tactile connection the very first moment that we saw each other.

And then every day I made sure that I was interacting with each one of those kids in a variety of ways.

That first day and in that first week, it was important that we would create a microcosm for the rest of the year.

And so I wanted to take them through in miniature what our discussion would be like, what an essay would look like, how we would handle situations.

And so in that first day, I usually bounced around the room a lot.

- You weren't afraid to be close to your students while you were teaching.

- Oh no, absolutely be close to them.

- I asked you Eric to consider reading for us just a little bit.

And I've asked, I selected a couple of paragraphs about emotion and you've selected two as well.

And I think this might be a good time in tonight's episode for you to share a little sliver maybe about what you have written.

Could you do that for us please?

- Oh, I'd be honored.

Emotion plays such a big part in our classroom because I really think that it's, if you're talking about a garden, then what the flowers need to survive is sunshine.

They need rain.

And sometimes that can be a little bit uncomfortable, too much rain, too much sun, but without it, you've got a desert.

And so emotion is really what pulled us together and made us more organic.

So this paragraph talks about my feelings about emotion in the classroom.

And again, this book is written and dedicated to young teachers, especially those in college who are just making their way.

At first you might be a bit wary of unleashing the power of a room full of teenagers who are, to put a politely, exuberant.

I know that in my early years, I enjoyed all of that spirit, but I was always a little nervous that what started out as an enjoyable exercise could quickly turn into a riot if I turned off the cruise control.

This was especially true of my middle-school classes.

An activity that brought laughter and movement could escalate into a frenzy with little warning.

And once that happened, it was hard to put the genie back into the bottle.

Of course you will be counseled by various colleagues about the dangers of emotion in your classroom.

Of allowing your students to express too much of an emotion.

But can you imagine teaching from day to day in a sedate, perhaps even a sterile environment?

Do we really want to drag your kids along class period by class period?

If you bind them with rules and warnings to tamp down their enthusiasm, that is exactly what you'll have to do in order to move them along academically.

- And Eric, there's another paragraph that kind of ties into that emotion that I'd like you to share as well.

This is when you have picked out.

- You mentioned early, Craig about I to we, and that concept comes from The Grapes of Wrath.

And John Steinbeck's talking about the movement that started during the dust bowl, when people realized that they'd be stronger as a group than as individuals.

And that's something I sought in my classroom every year, but it's not something that happened right away.

Usually it took a little bit longer into the school year before kids started feeling like they were an entity, they were together.

One assignment that I loved giving my students was the drawing of a life map.

What they were to do was in whatever format they wanted, to represent the highlights and the lowlights of their life.

When the assignment came due, we would take our maps, sit in a circle on the floor, and the kids were free to choose to share if they wanted to.

And some kids didn't want to share, but a lot of kids did.

What happened when we talked about our lives and things that had happened to us, was a lot of laughter and a lot of recognition, but every once in a while, there'd be a sudden emotional tug and tears would come and voices would quaver.

And that's really what brought us together.

So this paragraph relates to that.

I had principals who warned me that emotion was a dangerous thing in a classroom, that I should avoid asking my students to reach into their hearts and share their feelings with their classmates and their teacher.

I have to wonder whether those leaders ever sat on the floor of a classroom, ever felt the energy that an emotional release has upon a group that is ready to become one entity.

Whenever I could, I left the door open to our classroom, happy to let passers by see the beauty of the learning therein, shutting it only when the sounds of that learning might disturb other classes or when noises from the hallway might bother us.

The day of the life maps was a time I closed our door because the power we were creating was too precious to let escape.

- I just wonder, would you have been a successful teacher in this world of COVID because what you cultivate, it seems to me, is so personal with your students that I think it would be hard to mimic that in this tech environment like you and I are visiting on now.

- Yeah, you know what, I would have enjoyed the challenge.

And I look at what our children are accomplishing and our son and our daughter and their spouses are all teachers, and they're all working in very difficult situations right now.

And they're finding creative ways to really touch their kids.

It's not the same though.

And I write in the book about the power of being able to kneel in front of a student's desk, about 18 inches away from that kid's eyes.

And just be able to look deeply into each other's eyes, to speak in voices that only the kids in the immediate vicinity might hear.

It's such an intimacy.

And that same intimacy is hard to do on Zoom.

However, we achieved that also through writing.

And that was a technology.

- You talk about emotion, you talk about on organic experience.

You also talk about love and you weren't afraid to love your students.

What do you mean by that?

- You know, that's a word that we're, another word we're warned about is, you know, be careful not to use the word love too much in school, but I love my kids my kids love me.

We said that all the time to each other.

I don't know how you can not love working with young hearts and minds.

And because we did so much beyond the standards that we're required to cover in the class, because we really worked hard to get to know each other and to appreciate each, that was my role, I thought, was to create opportunities for kids to get to know each other better and to share more.

And it took a lot of time.

It took a lot of patience, but a love develops.

- Eric, you write in the book that teenagers don't want to be patronized, that you had to learn not to say, hey, good job, even if it wasn't really a good job and that you evolved over time with the confidence, perhaps, to teach that way.

- Well, one thing that I developed with the help of our son, Paul, was standards-based grading.

And our daughter, Ellen, is also pursuing that now in her teaching.

And in order to do that, I created a rubric for our writing and a rubric for our presentations.

And that was pretty much a roadmap for the kids to know how they were going to be evaluated.

In writing, it was 20 different benchmarks on any essay.

And what I told the kids was, okay, I'm going to look at your paper.

I'm going to evaluate it with the rubric.

And the rubric is the rubric.

You know, I am not the judge here.

The rubric is, I'm your coach.

- Again, we're talking of your book, "I Was Not the Blossom," and it's a day by day, pretty much blog post with then reflection of your final year of teaching.

And I want you, Eric, to talk with me about an entry that you made on March 22nd, 2017.

- I know that one.

- I'll bet you do.

And you called it a special post, I think, in the book.

And it's when you and your wife together had decided to retire.

How did you know it was time?

Because I don't think your students agreed with you.

- No, they still don't.

We had planned to teach maybe one more year past 2017, but we'd always talked about retiring at the same time.

And as the year started, I'm very sentimental, I wanted to know before the final year because I want him to, ah, this is the last September.

This is the last time we're going to read the Odyssey.

I wanted to do all that.

But you know, as the year went on, we realized that we were just plain tired and we knew that that we could retire, financially it wasn't an issue.

And we just thought about, you know, do we really want to go one more year?

Am I going to compromise my teaching because I feel that way?

And so it was in February that we finally decided, okay this is going to be it.

And then it was a matter of talking to all those people in the equation.

Talking to my principals and telling my department, which I didn't want to do at a department meeting.

I taught with some of those people for 20 years I wanted to talk to them one-on-one.

Then tell the faculty, then tell my students.

And then we ended up coining a term after that, that we weren't going to retire, we were going to untire, because I thought as an English teacher, I thought retire sounds like I'm going to be tired again.

And I really don't want to be tired again.

- Leads to my next question, and you write about this in context of your students, but the Christmas candle.

- Yes.

- What's past is prologue, William Shakespeare wrote in the Tempest.

This has been your prologue.

What's next, Eric?

What do you have in your future?

- Well, I've created a second blog and that's been going for a year and a half.

Sort of extending my career a little bit longer, talking about, again, perspective on teaching.

I'm kicking around a podcast, but it's in the zygote stage.

So right now I'm scripting that, but I think that'd be a lot of fun to put out a podcast.

- It'd be great to listen to.

Eric, I can't say, I mean, we have teachers in my family and I admire what they do.

This is a book, not only, I think for young men and women who are thinking of becoming a teacher, perhaps young men and women who have taught for a couple of years, but even teachers who have taught for a very long time, school board members, administrators.

I think this is a wonderful book for parents.

And I think it is from the context to understand what maybe to hope for for their children as they are students to experience in a classroom.

Your book, "I Was Not the Blossom," Eric, is just very inspiring, even for me, who now have grandkids that are matriculating through school systems.

And I'm very hopeful that many, many who want to be teachers or current teachers can read your book.

So congratulations for it.

I hope it's been well received.

- Thank you, thank you.

Looking forward to, to pushing it out farther, and I would love for that, for the book to reach those young minds you're talking about.

So certainly the garden is the controlling metaphor of the book, but there are analogies throughout because I always believe that analogy is the soul of teaching.

It's really how you reach all the students, is to be able to speak in the language they understand, the examples they understand.

So I provide another analogy here toward the teaching process.

Eventually I did see myself surrounded by beautiful blossoms, but another analogy also comes to mind.

As I was once an infant in my own learning, in my own teaching, so are my students when they first arrived in our classroom.

No matter what previous experiences they'd had, no matter how gifted they were in their language skills, all were born into a new environment on that very first day of the school year.

As the early weeks evolved, my kids watched me as their model, witnessed how I wrote and read aloud, how I expressed my interpretations.

I watched them as they learned to in a sense rollover and sit up, to crawl, to take their first steps while I held their hands, and finally to walk on their own, moving unsteadily, but joyfully into my arms.

I encourage them when they wobbled, picked them up when they teetered and fell.

I celebrated their independence and I delighted in walking beside them.

In sharing what we all learned together, as we explored ideas and concepts.

As their graduation neared, we found ourselves running side-by-side until they found their own pace, turning to wave as they sprinted far beyond me.

Wary and yet fulfilled, I rested for a while and then made my way back to the beginning welcoming a new nursery full of young minds.

- Eric, I can't thank you enough.

This book has made an impression on me, written by a former Wyoming teacher of the year and with many other awards as well.

So I can't thank you enough, Eric, for sharing the book with me and for sharing it with our viewers tonight on Wyoming Chronicle.

- You're welcome, Craig.

And thank you for letting me reminisce a little bit about my favorite profession.

(dramatic music) - [Announcer] This program was funded in part by a grant for Newman's Own Foundation.

Working to nourish the common good by donating all profits from Newman's Own food and beverage products to charitable organizations that seek to make the world a better place.

More information is available at Newmansownfoundation.org.

Funding for this program is made possible in part by the Wyoming Humanities Council, helping Wyoming take a closer look at life through the humanities, thinkwhy.org, and by the members of the Wyoming PBS Foundation.

Thank you for your support.