Interview with David Vocke

Karen Blair: Dr. Vocke, thank you so much for your willingness to be part of the Teacher Education Oral History Project. Your story will add immeasurably to our understanding of teacher education across time, especially at Towson University. I think the place we should begin is in the beginning. Could you share with us a little bit about your early social context: where you grew up, what kinds of career thoughts you were having as you went through high school? David Vocke: Alright. I grew up in Fairfield, Ohio, which is a suburb of Cincinnati. I went to high school at Badin High School, which is one of the Catholic high schools. It’s actually in Hamilton, Ohio. I graduated in 1973. I enjoyed school. I had fun in school. I liked my teachers. I thought then that I would be a teacher. When I graduated in ‘73 and I had a brother who had gone through at that point, two sisters who had gone through, but none of my siblings went to college. It was still kind of accepted that in the group I socialized with in high school, we’d all go to school and we did. I went first to Marian College, a small Catholic college in Indianapolis. I had a teacher who was influential, that knew the admissions director there and arranged a trip to go. There was myself and two others I went to high school with, who went there. I had some influential social studies teachers in high school that I enjoyed. I was in student government and student council. I was a student council member in high school. That was a little bit different because in Ohio, football is a big deal. Lots of my friends, we all socialized together. We had good times. I still have good friends back in Fairfield and Hamilton. I went to Marian and I majored in accounting. I have a brother--in--law who was a teacher. Everyone at that time said don’t go into teaching because they saw the end of the baby boom generation and the decline in enrollments and the reduction in force that was coming in the teaching profession. I took two years of bookkeeping——I guess it was accounting, but it was really just like bookkeeping in high school——I kind of enjoyed that. So I did that for a couple of years, and then I decided that I really didn’t want to be an accountant. We got into oil depletion allowance and other topics that just really didn’t do much for me. I switched my major to social studies after two years of Marian, which I enjoyed. The school had about 900 students. It was enjoyable; there were a lot of other students from Cincinnati, from La Salle, from Elder. Those were all big Catholic high schools in Cincinnati. I made a lot of friends there. My dad passed away between my freshman and sophomore year. I still had a younger brother at home. In order to help my mom, I went and transferred to Miami University, in Ohio, which is thirty miles from my hometown. It was a little closer, so I could go back home on weekends, if needed, and help. I wasn’t paying out--of --state tuition at private school. That was beneficial. I went to Miami and that’s where I decided that I was going to be a social studies teacher. It was something I’d always wanted to do and I just decided I’d do what I had to do to find a job. I found my mentor there. It was a professor by the name of Mike Fuller who was the social studies main instructor there and my advisor. He really helped me through, because transferring, being an accounting major, I had to take summer classes. But, I got out; I graduated in four years and a summer. I was putting my way through school. I did get help with social security survivor benefits, but I worked in a bar. I tended bar for two years while I went to school. I really enjoyed those years in Miami. Miami’s got a great reputation. They’ve got a great education program. K.B.: Could you tell us a little bit——do you remember anything about your student teaching experience? D.V.: Yes, I student taught at Withrow Junior High School in Oxford. Miami’s kind of isolated. It’s in a very rural part of southeastern Ohio. Some students go to Hamilton, which is there, but that’s about a twenty mile drive, or into Cincinnati, which is about thirty--five miles. Or close to Dayton or into small rural districts in Ohio. I think because I knew Mike Fuller so well, he got me the one in town in Oxford, which was about three blocks from school. I did eighth grade American history with Dale Rolfus. Then we called them cooperating teachers; I guess today he would be my mentor. I did sixteen weeks of American history and really enjoyed it. Dale was a real sociable guy. A real good social studies teacher. A great mentor to have. I helped coach the track team with him and his wife. Another teacher there was Tammy Walker. Her husband was one of the top football players at Miami. He went on to coach Northwestern University, but she was the track coach. They had coached together, so we helped. K.B.: This was while you were student teaching? D.V.: This was during student teaching. K.B.: So you were considerably engaged in the school. D.V.: Yes. I felt like you had to be immersed. It was really an enjoyable time. It was somewhat stressful, but I enjoyed what I was doing. I liked the work. I didn’t have to travel as much as some of my colleagues did. That was beneficial. K.B.: So you’re feeling at the end . . . about time you’re graduating, completing . . . that you’re feeling really good about this choice? D.V.: Sort of, because there were no jobs. I didn’t graduate until July. I went through a summer graduation. In the sense of finishing the program and having the degree and getting the certification, that all happened late in July and early August with the school year coming around Labor Day. I scrambled. I can remember I had five job interviews. One was in Waverly, Ohio, which is in the far southeastern edge of Ohio, in Appalachian coal country. I went for the interview. At the interview was the school superintendent, the school principal, and the football coach and I can still remember the first question they asked me was, "What’s an Oklahoma defense?" They wanted a social studies teacher that could coach football. That didn’t go so well. I’m kind of glad it didn’t; I may have taken a completely different path. K.B.: It wasn’t a tight fit. D.V.: That was about three hours away. Then I went to an interview in Kettering, Ohio. That was around Dayton. They wanted a soccer coach. So that didn’t go so well. But, about four days before school started, I interviewed at a small suburban school that abuts the city of Cincinnati. In Ohio, there are over 400 districts, so they’re much smaller. It was a small community called North College Hill. They had two elementary schools, I believe. A junior high, back then, and a high school. Basically, they didn’t even have any buses. All the kids walked to school. The district was that small. I got a job there teaching ninth grade world cultures and eleventh grade world history to two classes, ancient world history. That was four days before school started. Then I was the cross country coach because they never had a cross country team. I tried to recruit kids; I didn’t know anybody. You needed eight kids for a team, I think. I had seven. Whenever we went to a meet and were in the paper, it was always DNF next to our name. Did Not Field a team. I had nice kids there who came out. That was enjoyable. I got to know people in the district and got to know some of the parents and some of the other coaches. It was interesting because the world cultures texts that they used——anybody in social studies——they were Larry Cuban texts. We had four different cultures that we covered. We had Japan and Mexico and Kenya... oh, and then France. Those were our four, but I only had enough textbooks for a set of Japan. I had thirty of those. I had to teach that. I could only do two cultures at a time, so that was two preps; then, I had the world history prep that I had to do for the juniors. K.B.: And nothing about the United States? D.V.: No, which was kind of my concentration and what I did my student teaching in. But it was enjoyable. That was tough, especially in the beginning. I lived at home those first four months. I think I moved in November with some of my buddies to an apartment in Cincinnati. K.B.: How long did you stay there? D.V.: I was there for a year. There was another teacher. She was hired. She was a business teacher. She was twenty--two and I was twenty--two. Everyone else was in there thirties. They hadn’t hired another teacher in seven years. Then we both got riffed with reduction in force. Fortunately, in Ohio, the school districts are so small that each district doesn’t have its own vocational school. They have what they call joint vocational school districts. A lot of suburban districts feed into a joint high school. It’s called the Great Oaks System. It was a joint vocational school district. The folks that I worked with, and really the principal I worked with——I can see his face, but I can’t remember his name. The vice principal was Doug King. I guess Doug had a role in it too. They contacted the joint vocational school; Diamond Oaks vocational school was the school that they actually got me a job at. Then I went and taught seniors American history and government, because the kids from North College Hill would be at North College their freshmen and sophomore years and then feed into the vocational schools for their junior and senior years. K.B.: Now that’s an interesting and different group of students for you. D.V.: Yes. They were interesting. Especially the group right after lunch. Frank McCamon and Ray Davis. I don’t think they’ll see this, but I can still remember that group. So I went there and I taught there for three years. It was interesting because the kids were not motivated for social studies, not motivated for English. They were motivated for auto mechanics or they had an equestrian program, or carpentry program or HVAC. They were nice kids. I still say that they appreciated teachers who tried to make a difference. This will date me. This would have been ‘78 to ‘81. At that time Diamond Oaks had a smoking lounge. So imagine that. K.B.: For students? D.V.: For students. (The teacher’s lounge was bad enough for all the teachers who smoked.) That was my duty, to be on the smoking lounge at lunch to make sure the kids weren’t smoking things other than cigarettes and transactions weren’t taking place and those kinds of things. Really, I think that was one of the best things for me. I got to know a lot of students that way. They’d come up and talk to you. You try to empathize with the students. They appreciate when teachers take an interest in you. That was Diamond Oaks. It was a good place. You had to teach in order to keep kids interested. It was fun because a lot of it was American government. We had the Iran hostage crisis at the time. We had the election with Carter and Reagan. There were lots of ways you could relate social studies to students. We had the gas prices going up at that time. Those kids were interested in those kinds of things. That was lots of fun. K.B.: At some point you’re going to continue your education, which has always been a push for teachers. At least to pursue a master’s degree. When did that take shape? D.V.: I started while I was at Diamond Oaks. I’d take a summer class here and a summer class there. I went back to Miami. I wanted to continue working with Mike Fuller. During my third year at the Oaks, I just decided that I’m going to go back. I applied for an assistantship at Miami. I wanted to go back and just do it all in one straight shot and get it finished. I thought I’d apply at another school district in Cincinnati, once I had it. There are probably 80 school districts in the Cincinnati area. You know, to move on to another district. That would have been ‘81, I believe. I got an assistantship at Miami. They still had a lab school; McGuffey Lab School was there. That was kindergarten through eighth grade. I then taught a year as my assistantship. I was an English Language Arts and social studies teacher for grades six, seven, and eight. K.B.: Interesting. D.V.: The education building is McGuffey Hall. William Holmes McGuffey did teach at Miami. He was a professor there. That only lasted a few more years, then it closed, much like we lost Lida Lee Tall. They lost McGuffey about five years after I left. I did my master’s degree in a year there. I got out in the summer. Mike Fuller was a graduate of the University of Iowa in the early ‘60s. While I was there, I was applying to grad schools for my doctorate. I didn’t really know what that was. Mike thought I had some potential there. I applied. I know I applied at Indiana and I applied at Iowa. I got into both places, but because of Mike’s influence, I went to the University of Iowa. The professor there that he had worked with was John Hafner who, in the ‘50s, was a significant person within the National Council for the Social Studies and was really a nice guy. I went to work with John, but he’d actually retired; that was the year that he retired. But, I still house sat for him. I cut his grass for him. We needed the money. There were other influential folks there. Bob Fitch was another big name in social studies in the ‘70s and Jerry Shive was my dissertation advisor there. He was relatively new, but had a significant influence. I really wanted to do the Ph.D. more. I’ve got to be honest, when I went through undergrad school, I didn’t know what it took. I didn’t know the ins and outs. But, I kind of stumbled my way through. I still believe that if you persevere, you can get through, and if you work hard. So Robin and I got married that summer of ’82, in August of ‘82. We packed things. Actually, a friend of mine that I taught with at Diamond Oaks, we packed up his pickup truck and a U--haul trailer and took everything to Iowa City that we had. We got married in the beginning of August. By mid August, we were in Iowa City and taking classes. Robin worked at . . . they have a great hospital system there. They’re the main hospital for the state of Iowa. She worked at the University of Iowa hospitals. I had my assistantship there and worked with Jerry Shive in the research office. Did my three years and came out in ‘85 with my doctorate. It was fun. We had a close--knit group of friends. A lot of our friends were nurses that Robin worked with and their husbands who were either going through——one was going through an engineering school and the other ones were going through medical programs. That’s where I learned that doctors are pretty much like everybody else. They might not be the brightest guys there, either. We had enjoyable times. The work in the doctoral program was good. I did a lot of history and political science and anthropology courses. It was mainly . . . I had some influential folks in the education field but mainly in things like international education, those kinds of things. Jerry helped me in terms of . . . that’s where I first taught foundations. I taught in addition to working in the research office. Jerry let me watch him a few times first and then helped me with the curriculum there. That’s how I got started teaching foundations. Then, I supervised student teachers there all through these little burghs in Iowa to Cedar Rapids, the big city in Iowa. I did my doctoral dissertation on global studies. There was a nonprofit from Bettendorf, which is on the Mississippi River, in Bettendorf, Iowa. No, actually it was in Muscatine, Iowa. They are one of those that advertises on MPR [Maryland Public Radio]. They support those things; they did a study on global studies that was interesting. It served me well, initially. I got a lot from being in Iowa. I had a historian on my dissertation committee by the name of Ellis Hawley who was one of the top scholars in terms of the Hoover presidency. Not that a lot of people would find that too interesting, but Hoover was from right around there. On the ‘20s, his classes were just amazing. He was a great person to have on the committee. Another advisor, or member of my committee, was Scott McNabb, who was a professor in the College of Education, who did a lot with international studies. He did a lot on Thailand, Vietnam, and China. We still had an international course on Chinese education, which was interesting. I did really well by going to Iowa. I’m glad that it worked out. K.B.: So there you are, doctorate in hand, lickety--split. Three years and you’re done. You’re looking for employment. D.V.: Right. So my first job, because . . . again, it was another summer graduation and you’re scrambling. I applied at many places. I went to the AACTE [American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education] conference. Jerry said that’s where I needed to go to find a job. It was in Denver. They paid my airfare and maybe my hotel. I remember I took the public transportation from the airport (that was when it was closer to Denver than it is now) into the hotel. Then I interviewed those days. I interviewed with Eastern Michigan, the University of Missouri. I would send resumes everywhere. I had a number of interviews. Some were good and some were not so good. It gave me some experience. Ended up, the job I took was at a college in northwest Iowa. City of Storm Lake, Iowa, which is a small place, about 10,000 people, although that was the major metropolitan area for northwest Iowa, at Buena Vista College. K.B.: How big a school? D.V.: About 900 students. It’s interesting. There’s actually a lake in Storm Lake. It’s not very deep. The campus was right on the shores of the lake. It had a great endowment. There was a family called the Siebens. They made their money in oil in Canada. They had just finished a conference center, union, classroom buildings for the business school that was actually mostly underground because the winters were so cold. It was one of those first buildings to take advantage of being underground. Because it was so new, it was really a nice place to be. Of course the education building was an old dump, but for the campus it was nice. I made some good friends there. There were some folks who were really dedicated and young. Folks in our position. Scott was born there in July, after we’d been there for a year. We rented a house three blocks from campus so I could walk to campus. Robin was a school nurse. She was an RN, but the hospital had about 25 beds----they didn’t need an RN, but they needed a school nurse. She was the school nurse for the elementary school, the middle school and the high school. She had her Future Nurses Club that she worked with. I can remember walking to classes in January; with wind chill and the blowing wind, it was about 50 below zero. The actual temperature was 21 below zero. K.B.: So this might suggest . . . D.V.: So the winds did come whipping across the plains. K.B.: So it’s cold and maybe we’re thinking at some point, “It certainly would be nicer to be in a warmer climate.” D.V.: Yes. So we moved. We were there for a year. Again, I supervised student teachers. I mean you did everything. I taught general methods; I taught social studies methods. We were out in the hinterland. I’d be supervising student teachers in school districts that had 120 kids, K--12, in the schools. I really got to know western and northwestern Iowa. We were two hours from Omaha and then an hour and a half from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, which were the two places you’d fly out of if you had a conference or something to go to. The kids were very nice. The people were dedicated to teacher education. I thought we did a nice job in terms of preparing kids for the classroom. Actually, I had applied at the University of Texas at Arlington at the same time when I was initially looking for a job out of grad school. They had turned me down. Actually, after I signed the contract with Buena Vista, they had called back and said, “You know what, we had another resignation. Can you come down?” I told them I’d signed a contract. I can’t do that. The position came up again, so I applied again. Went down and interviewed at the University of Texas at Arlington. Now we’re moving from 10,000 people in Storm Lake to Arlington, which is the new suburb between Dallas and Fort Worth, a school of 30,000. Mainly an engineering school, but they had the Center for Professional Teacher Education. I interviewed and got the job there. I left after a year in Storm Lake. We loaded up the U--haul again. Scott was three weeks old. We made the trek from Storm Lake to Dallas--Fort Worth and spent three years there. I enjoyed it, but Texas was not exceptionally hospitable towards teacher education. K.B.: It sounds like the school, particularly, was more interested in engineering and those kinds of fields. D.V.: Yes. This would have been ‘86--‘89. The oil industry was going bust at this time. We had a program that took a lot of engineers who had been working in the oil and petro--chemical industry, and tried to prepare them for teaching in math and science. They had tons of folks. They weren’t generally all that successful because a lot of them had been out in West Texas working drilling holes and figuring out where to drill holes. They really didn’t know kids too much. The state was somewhat hostile towards a lot of credits in terms of teacher education programs. Their idea was, “Let’s streamline and make it an easy pathway to get people into teacher certification,” rather than prepare them with more training. It was enjoyable. Living there was enjoyable. We were in a neighborhood with a lot of other young people that were in the same boat. By the time we left Scott was three. Katie was just born. She was three weeks when we left. I worked with some really good people at UTA, especially a guy by the name of Skip Chilcoat, who was a good writer in terms of social studies and had a lot of innovative ideas as far as social studies instruction was concerned. We collaborated on some things Skip left a year after I did and went to BYU [Brigham Young University] and continued his career there. We did a lot of presentations together, wrote some things together. He made it enjoyable in terms of having a colleague in an office next to you that you could share things with. So, that was interesting. Again, did a lot of teaching foundations and general methods courses. We didn’t have room for a specific methods course, so it wasn’t social studies methods. K.B.: And that was the nature of the program, this condensed experience? D.V.: Yes. You had to have a methods course. I don’t even think we did the reading courses there. You had to have foundations. You had an assessment course. We had people who specialized in those kinds of things. I supervised student teachers again. The school systems were different in Texas than here. Especially in Arlington and the Dallas--Fort Worth area. A lot larger school systems. Again, I had kids that really worked hard and did a nice job. I was pretty active in the PDK [Phi Delta Kappa] chapter there. That was a good group to get to know people in the school systems. I don’t know if you remember Jack Frymeir at PDK, he was doing the study on students at risk and had the chapters collect data. So I worked with the school systems in terms of that. That was rewarding in terms of getting to know school systems and seeing how they collected that kind of data. K.B.: And you would have a much larger pool of students. You could really find some interesting things with those data. D.V.: We saw the handwriting on the wall in terms of Texas’s attitude towards education. Sorry for those folks that are there, but I think they would agree, even today, from what I hear. We were looking——we really wanted to get back to the Midwest. We would have liked to get back to Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, somewhere around there. I applied again. That would have been around Christmastime in ‘89 or ‘88, ’89. I had interviews here at Towson. I had an interview at Old Dominion. I had one at Wittenberg, in Ohio. I had an interview at Xavier at Cincinnati, which would have been going back home. I think in the scheme of things, I can still remember it was April the 11th when I interviewed here. There was Jim Lawlor, Gloria Neubert, Selma Lyons, Margaret Kiley, Sam Brodbelt, and Mike Jessup. I think Lois Stover was the new faculty member. K.B.: Who was chair? D.V.: Jim was chair. This would have been after . . . I don’t know, they have those stories of all those people that preceded Jim. Jim was my contact and was the chair. He was calling all the time. I mean, it was a nice relationship. I enjoyed that Jim was really hands on and on top of things. The day I interviewed was the 11th because I got an award at UTA. I got a “teacher of the year” award. That day was when they gave the award before the faculty senate. I was here and Robin had to go and accept the award. She was pregnant with Katie at the time. She wasn’t real happy with the fact that she had to go and receive the award in my place. I called. There used to be a pay phone at the Lecture Hall, on that ramp that used to come down from Hawkins. We didn’t have the cell phones then. I called and talked to her after the interview and I said, “I think things have gone well; I might get an offer here.” Actually I’d gotten offers at all the other places and ended up picking Towson. It just seemed like the right fit. It didn’t sit well with siblings and other family members back home because the Xavier job was right in my back yard. It just wasn’t a good fit for me. So this was. Once again, we packed up the U--haul. We had a three week old baby. We made the trek from the Dallas--Fort Worth area to Baltimore. That was in August of ‘89 we moved here. I’ve been here since. We were going to head back to the Midwest, probably after five to six years . . . that was the original plan. K.B.: But you didn’t have another three week old baby, so you didn’t go. D.V.: But we didn’t have a three--week old baby----we stopped that. At one point, when I was looking, Robin was enrolled in a graduate program at UMB [University of Maryland at Baltimore] in nursing. Nursing informatics. I think there was only one other program in the country. We were getting tuition remission. She wanted to finish that program. That took a couple years. By the time we looked, Scott was in middle school and Katie was entrenched in elementary school. We thought, “Well, maybe it wouldn’t be a good idea to move.” Plus, things were going well for both of us, and things were going well here. Yes, so I guess I’ll finish out 24 years come this August and then will be into the 25th. K.B.: What kinds of things have you done here at Towson? Twenty--four years. I bet you’ve done a variety of different things. You were acting chair, or chair. I’m not quite certain which. D.V.: I did a stint as chair from ‘94 to ‘95. I can still remember Jim when I did leave [from the interview]——I can’t remember who took me to the airport---- I can remember down on that lower parking lot that was there next to the union. He said, “Someday you may even want to be chair here. I said, “Jim that will never happen. I don’t have any desire to be an administrator.” I think it was the 94--95 year that Jim wanted to come out. I did a year stint as chair then. I think we hired Larry Leak after that. Larry did three years, then Jim came back. Then Jim wanted to retire, in 2004, so I agreed to do it for a year. Then four years later I came out (2004 to 2008.) We got through the 2007 NCATE [National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education] review and then I came out. So, I did five years out of those 24 as chair. K.B.: From somebody who didn’t want administration. D.V.: I will not go back into administration. I’ve had the experience. I think I did a nice job at it. There were certain aspects that were rewarding with that job, but I enjoy teaching. That’s what I spend most of my time doing. I haven’t taught probably as many courses; I know many people have a whole list of courses. I’ve primarily done the social studies methods and foundations course, and then social studies related courses. That’s what I enjoy----I enjoy working with the undergrads. K.B.: Did you observe student teachers? D.V.: Yes. I supervised lots of student teachers as well, which gets me out in the schools. I’m not supervising them currently, but I do have a class that goes out to other schools. We’re out in Pikesville Middle School. It’s nice to go out because I’ve got several former students that are there. It’s nice to see those folks. I’d taken another class, a few years prior, to Dumbarton Middle School, which is where Scott and Katie went through school. There are lots of former students that are there. I see a lot of folks when I’m out at different functions. It’s rewarding to see those folks now moving into administrative roles. We have several who are high school or middle school principals in the metropolitan area. That’s enjoyable. I also worked on different programs, primarily looking at . . . I think their official title is “pre-- collegiate.” It’s a program to recruit kids either into college or into the teaching profession. So really, for seven years, a good part of the ‘90s, I worked on a grant from Reader’s Digest. The DeWitt Wallace grant that Morgan State had called Project PRIME, which was the program to recruit/inspire minorities into education. I was Towson’s rep. There was a representative from Hopkins, Morgan, Coppin, from Loyola, from Notre Dame, from BCCC [Baltimore City Community College]. The idea was to grow your own teachers. We had lots of different programs. There was a high school course that we got put into the city school curriculum. And then, I worked with the middle school program where we had about a dozen middle schools that worked with a course that focused on the teaching profession and getting kids interested in going to college and teaching. That was rewarding. Jim Binko kind of got me into that, tapped me for that. I got to know other folks in institutions of higher education. I got to know the Baltimore City School System that way. I really appreciated that. That lead to some work with MHEC [Maryland Higher Education Commission]. I did some things with pre--collegiate intervention programs with MHEC. I worked with Kay Broadwater in the Art Department. Beth Wilkins who was here . . . we got a grant through the American Association of University Women where we worked a couple years with Western High School in Baltimore City. It was a program to recruit females into math and science teaching. It had forty girls a year from Western that would come for academies we ran in conjunction with the folks in math and science. That was enjoyable to do. It was enjoyable to see those girls come to Towson and there was a significant number of them who came Towson and graduated from here and went on to teaching. I did another Gear Up Program with Barbara Bass in the Maryland Writing Project. We had a lot of those kids come through. I worked with Digital Harbor High School, Walbrook High School, what was then Walbrook. They’ve got so many names for these different smaller schools. I worked with Edmonson High School as well. That was enjoyable to have those kids. We worked a lot of Saturdays with workshops for these kids, and then going out and doing workshops for their parents. That was interesting to do. Those were some of the things I did while I’ve been here. K.B.: That’s a lot of things. How has teacher education changed, do you think, from the time when you did student teaching to what you’re engaging students in now? Or has it not changed? I’m not suggesting that it even needed to be changed. D.V.: I don’t know. I think Miami prepared me so well because I actually had two method courses in social studies. A lot of that is on the doorstep of Mike Fuller just because he was such a dedicated person and I had such great experiences with my student teaching. I think a lot of it is what you put into it. I would assume that Teacher Ed was a lot like what was going on at Miami. I think things went well. I think when I came here in ‘89 with what was going on with the folks we had, I think Towson did a great job in terms of producing teachers. I think the one thing that has made a big difference, and I think was an improvement, that was going for us in the late 90s and early 2000s, was the Professional Development School network. It’s not a perfect system but I think it’s better than what we were doing back then. Because then, I can remember with the principles class, Principles of Secondary Education, where students get an initial field experience. I can still remember they got these little cards the teachers had to sign off on when they got to twenty credits. We just kind of sent them anywhere. We really had very little control over that. We didn’t know what that experience was like. Now we go out with them. We know what they’re seeing and then we can bring that back into the classroom. That’s good. I think for secondary . . . we’ve got that internship two days a week, just prior to student teaching, where they go and spend a lot of time in the school. So they get to know the kids and the classrooms and the curriculum and the mentors that they’re working with. That’s beneficial because then they go in and student teach and they’re more set up to be successful student teaching. I can remember, again, going to Baltimore County offices with the social studies coordinator and saying, “Well, this teacher will be a good match for this student.” We wouldn’t let them know. They were still kind of going everywhere in the county rather than now, where we’re focused on the schools that we’ve developed a relationship with where the mentors know us and we know them and you’ve got a liaison that the school provides and we have a Towson person there in addition to the university supervisor. I think that’s a much better system for our folks. I guess I could say that the focus on assessment is a change. I’m still not convinced that it’s the savior that a lot of folks feel that it’s going to be. I think that’s another thing that our students have to focus on. K.B.: This is assessment of the kids in schools? D.V.: It’s of the kids in school but it’s of our students, too. We have to document these experiences that our students have. Sometimes I think, overall, whether it be in the K--12 setting or the higher ed setting, that just becomes so cumbersome. I really think this emphasis on the assessments in terms of evaluation of teachers is going to be an issue that I think is going to be extremely challenging for people going into teacher education and into the teaching profession. I just see this trying to link student test scores or changes in student performance to a teacher’s salary is just going to be extremely problematic. I think it’s going to take away a lot of the joy that people feel in teaching. Maybe it’s necessary in terms of accountability, but I’m not yet convinced they’ve got a system in place that’s valid or reliable. I think that’s going to be problematic for young folks going into the profession. K.B.: Is there anything we’ve missed about your experience here or your career, generally, that you can think of that you would like to share? D.V.: I’m sure there are things. I don’t know. It’s been pretty amazing the way the campus has changed. When I came, there were 12,000 students. We were then Towson State University. We made the switch to Towson University; I guess that’s okay. Seeing all the landscaping is very different But just looking out Hawkins Hall, instead of seeing Lida Lee Tall there, seeing the College of Liberal Arts is pretty amazing. Just seeing all of the development over on the west campus with the different residence halls, the new Commons——West Village——over there is kind of amazing. I haven’t seen it lately, but the development of the new Towson Center is pretty wild. Going from 12,000 to, I guess our numbers are 22, is kind of amazing as well. K.B.: What kind of affect do you think that’s had on faculty here and teacher education? D.V.: I don’t think that larger is necessarily better. I don’t buy the argument that we have to get bigger. Not that we needed to stay at 12,000. I don’t think growth, just for its own sake, did that much for us. I’ve got to say that within . . . Secondary is what I know . . . is that we’ve still been able to maintain small class sizes and close contact with students. K.B.: It sounds like even closer contact with this PDS model in place. D.V.: Yes. Our cohorts have been small——that hasn’t been amazing in terms of its growth. I think that in that sense we’ve been fine, I just don’t know. I think that when you get so large, there are just things that you lose. It’s not quite as intimate as what you’d like. I’ve been around those 24 years. A lot, I guess I mean all of the people when I came, as you well know, have moved on. A lot of good people have followed them. That’s been kind of a change. I don’t know if perhaps not knowing as many people across campus is because we’ve grown so much might be a reality now that wasn’t when I first came. I was on more university--wide committees. I was on the Senate. I was on the Research and Development Committee for faculty, awarding those grants, so I guess I saw more people than I do now. But I’m not sure if our junior faculty get as much exposure to folks in the other colleges. So, I think that’s been a change. K.B.: Or maybe even the other departments in the College? D.V.: I used to know everyone who came to those College of Education meetings. That’s not the case anymore. I have to go more out of my way to introduce myself to folks. K.B.: Part of it is the rapid growth in the College of Education and the transition from faculty retiring and bringing in a whole lot of new faculty. D.V.: I think that’s it. K.B.: One last question. Having been in the field for more than a quarter of a century, what wisdom would you share with individuals who are considering teaching as a life choice? D.V.: We moved foundations when I came; it was kind of a capstone course. Now it’s kind of an intro to education course and actually going away because of the new CORE. I tell students, “One of the things you’ve got to do is investigate what it’s like in school.” So I try to give them----I have contacts with schools for after school clubs and those things. I tell them they have to volunteer or you’ve got to substitute teach. If you’ve got Fridays off, go and volunteer at a local school and try to substitute or go work with an ESOL group of students. There are different after school clubs at Dumbarton. I ask students if they want to work with kids because it’s not like when you were in middle school or high school. You’ve got to see them in a different context. I want to make sure they have thought about working with kids at that age. I try to get them to volunteer as much as they can. They’ve really got to think about that. They need to see those policy changes that are going on. They need to talk to teachers. They need to talk to the students that are going through. They really have to investigate if it’s something they want to do. Because, if they’re going to be good at it, teaching is a full--time career. It’s not, I mean this is kind of a misperception, I think that some people have. I mean not most of our students that go into it, but we do have a number of students that, “Well, I’ll just go into it and see what it’s like.” If you’re going to put the time and effort into it, we know we have a high attrition rate, you need to do more investigation before you go. But I think with the other students, it’s just . . . persevere. I saw one of the first--year teachers the other day and she was, “Oh my God, this is just so hard,” she said. And I would say, “When they come into principles, they say, “Oh, this is such a hard semester.” And then they go into the internship and, “Oh, this is even worse. It will be better when I student teach.” And then they go into student teaching and I always love when they come back that first night for their reading class. It’s like, “Oh, I’m so tired.” But, then, that first year of teaching is exceptionally difficult. You’ve just got to keep going. You’ve got to persevere and, by the time you get to that third year, you’ll be comfortable with where you are. You still won’t know everything, but you’re a little bit closer. And then think about improving your craft and go back to school for professional development things. So, I really think before getting into it, I think it’s something they really have to investigate and know about. Rather than, “Oh, gee, this is something that I’ll just do.” K.B.: It doesn’t pay particularly well. You really don’t get summers off, but it can be rewarding. D.V.: It is. It’s been a good career for me. I see students who have been out there for 15--20 years. That’s kind of hard to believe. But, they’ve enjoyed it. They have liked progressing as a career. It is kind of frustrating though; you know, after a year or two, they go into something else. It’s, “Oh, I just don’t like this.” You could have known that before. I feel bad for kids that take out the loans now and take on that burden of debt and decide after a year or two, “Well, I’m not going to do this,” and then they’ve got to switch. That’s tough. I think that’s another major difference. I was able to pay my way through school and took out some loans. I feel bad for students that have to go through that now with that burden of debt they are going to take on. K.B.: Last comment? Anything else? D.V.: Nope. This has been enjoyable. I hope this is helpful. K.B.: Wonderfully helpful. Thank you. D.V.: Thank you very much.