Q&A With Middle School Teacher Colin Lyons

 

Teaching is arguably one of the most important roles in society. A teacher isn’t just there to lecture and provide facts. A teacher is also there to be a mentor and a guide. To be a teacher is to educate the future generations and prepare them for the world. It is to provide the youth with critical thinking, and problem-solving skills so that they can be productive members of society. 

Some teachers accomplish this better than others. There is something about them that stands out, makes their class more engaging, or something about them that just clicks with their students. 

One of my teachers that stands out to me the most is my seventh-grade English teacher, Colin Lyons. I remember him attending the high school graduation, and frequently talking with former students whenever he would visit the high school. 

When I sat down with him over Zoom, kids filtered out of the classroom on their way to lunch. 

What made you interested in teaching and how long have you been teaching?

    This will be my 15th year. I did a lot of volunteering at a middle school. I was coaching track. I did track for a long time, and so I don't know, I just kind of found that working with kids was kind of easy and really fun, and I thought, you know, turning this into a career could be really beneficial to me and the community, and I liked it.

Jumping right off that, what feels the most rewarding about doing that? Being a teacher?

You know, honestly, probably one of the most rewarding things is stuff like this, reinteracting with my students. A former student from your class reached out and did a similar thing. It’s fun that I’m a lowly seventh- and eighth-grade teacher but have enough of an impact that they would remember me enough from past high school. I really do enjoy reconnecting with those kids and just seeing how much they progress. 

The other thing I like about teaching middle school specifically is that it’s such an interesting dichotomy of a kid center.  Your brain completely scrambles when you're 12 to 14. I really care about kids developing a sense of empathy and a sense of justice, that's really important to me. And kids that are 12 and 14 really care about justice, and they really care about right and wrong, and so it just kind of fits with my perspective.

What do you hope is the biggest takeaway your students receive from your class?

I teach American history, it’s a weird time in history right now, but I like my subject. What I really like is that kids feel a sense of worth and value in my class. It’s always at the top of my slideshows. 

I had a kid reach out that I taught several years ago. She's since moved to Germany, but she was saying she just got her first tattoo. I was like, “That’s great but weird to reach out to your middle school teacher about it.” She asked if I wanted to see it and I said sure, not knowing what I was agreeing to. It was a tattoo on her wrist that said “Worthy and Valuable.” I appreciate that. It’s hard right now, so many kids are depressed and struggling with a sense of anxiety. To be told and to believe that I have inherent value and worth as a person and in my community, and in my family and in my culture, that’s powerful and I like being a part of that. 

You mentioned Germany, you taught in Germany and Puerto Rico for a while? How did teaching in those places compare to Oregon?

I was teaching on military bases when I was doing that and the culture that the military expects is very different. There weren't behavior issues as much, coming from Hamlin Middle School in Springfield where behavior was our biggest upper-echelon issue at all times. The hard thing with the military was oftentimes the kids did not act out, not because they weren’t struggling to function in society. The kids did not act out because the military kind of drained in them or drilled into them that if you make a mistake, your parents will pay for it. 

The way that the military schools did it, if I had to write a referral, a kid curses in class, throws something, whatever, I did not call the parent. I called the supervisor of the green-suiter—whichever parent was in the military. If Johnny got in trouble, I did not call Johnny Senior, I called Johnny Senior's commanding officer and said, “Hey, Johnny Senior's kid is blowing up in my class,” and then the commanding officer would be like, “I'm going to take care of it,” and then the commanding officer would then pull the parent in, and say, “Hey, your son is wrecking the environment of our military school.” 

The parent would go home, and oftentimes, and no fault to what the military does, but, there's a lot of aggression, and the kid would just get whacked. I mean, it was just common that kids would be like, “I don't want my dad to hit me,” and that was more often than not. When I was like, “I'm going to write you a referral,” and the kids would just be in absolute tears, like, “Please don't, I can't do that.” And so there was a level of fear, it kind of reminded me of my dad's stories of getting smacked by the nuns, you know, like in the ’50s for being left-handed.

Hamlin was very different. There were a lot of behavior issues among the students, and there was a lot of empathy from teachers because there were students, one specifically, whose bedroom was underneath the kitchen table where their uncle would play Call of Duty until three in the morning on the couch. The family had absorbed another family in their tiny apartment, so of course a kid is going to be acting out when they don’t get any sleep. Of course a kid is going to be acting out if they're not eating. 

These kids' problems aren't because they are acting out because they are and they just want to be jerks. They are acting out because home is traumatic and school is safe. They know the teachers care about them and it’s just a way for them to expel their own aggression in the only way they know how to expel aggression. They're at the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs all the time, they're still just trying to find safe shelter and safe food, so very different between those two experiences.

As far as in the classroom, was there any insight you gained from teaching at Hamlin that you took with you when you went to Puerto Rico, or that you brought back?

I was a lot more accommodating than most teachers — maybe to a fault. I didn’t try to, I wasn't very relaxed and in my class. I tried to liven it up a bit. It’s hard to teach seventh graders history if you're not going to try to be a little silly. I had my little characters, I wore wigs, I had songs. Having kids develop a sense of joy through learning, as opposed to just doing it for a grade is so valuable to me. 

I was actually fired in Puerto Rico. I had a student come out as gay, and so I put up a pride flag just to support him because Puerto Rico was still pretty socially conservative. My principal fired me and we had to go through a whole lawsuit. I didn’t get my job back but I won the lawsuit. The hard thing was I really did work to develop a new sense of culture at that school. We did some Olympic games and murals around the school just to develop a sense of school culture and pride so that the kids could feel it was someplace they belonged and somewhere they wanted to be. 

What's the biggest struggle with teaching you’ve had?

Making grades matter. Grading assignments is always a difficult thing for me because I want to spend time really delving into each kid’s assignment and giving them quality feedback. In times that I’ve done that, middle school kids just don’t care. I’m not trying to use that as a cop out. I’ll do a paper, I’ll do a project, I’ll sit down with them, I show them, here's these things you can do. Then they’re like, “What grade is it now? A C-minus, great I’ll turn that in.”

So I don’t think that grades are this big incentive to move them forward in education. The reason they are incentivized for an A is because grandma is giving them 50 bucks for an A. You’re not caring to learn then, you’re caring to pay down your Playstation or whatever you get. 

I think grades are important but I’m also in the space where I don’t know that it’s doing the best job moving them forward. Oftentimes it’s just a letter on a paper for them. 

We continue to talk about issues with letter grades before moving on: What do you think the most important thing is that you’ve learned since you started teaching?

How important it is to say a kid's name. 

A 13- or 14-year-old, after going through puberty a bit, their brain is reconstructing itself. Their sense of identity is being rebuilt. The first thing they kind of re-recognize is their agency of their name. They like to toy with new dress. You don’t see grade-school goth kids, you don’t see many grade-school trans kids or grade-school LGBT kids, or kids developing into sports that aren’t popular like lacrosse, track or cross country. It’s not something little kids really do, but in middle school they’re like hey, I’m starting over, I’m going to try something new. The thing they get to own first coming out of that new growth is their name. 

I’ve worked really hard over the last four years to just use kids' names and I think they really do appreciate it. 

What was your biggest struggle when you were in school?

I grew up in Creswell, which in the ’90s was a logging town, and then the logging all dried up and there was poverty everywhere. I grew up super poor and my dad had cars parked in our front lawn. We were the house that was super gross, I carried a lot of embarrassment. I was a punk in middle school and when I got to high school I had an English teacher and she made English fun. It was really easy to make her laugh and she was super kind. 

That connection to another adult that valued me outside of just being a poor kid. She’s a big reason why I became a teacher. I didn’t know I could be educated and at the same time have fun with an adult who saw me as someone to be understood, recognized and valued. 

If you could go back and tell yourself something when you first started teaching, what would it be?

Organization.

I fashion myself as kind of a loose guy. The kids always enjoyed my class and we always learned something. I handed out assignments and tests, but my first five to seven years of teaching were exhausting because I didn’t know what I was doing the next week, the next day sometimes. It was just going from one thing to the next. 

Organizing from the get go and mapping things out. 

I don’t want to take up too much more of your time, I know you have a class to get back to, but you mentioned your childhood, which reminded me of a podcast you had, “Convince Us” and then “The Most Uninteresting Men in the World.” Any plans for new episodes soon?

The podcast with my friend Cory, he’s still doing podcast stuff but we talk about this every time we hang out. We need to do it. We had so much fun doing it. I’ll take this as a cue that I need to do an episode or two. 

What were the origins of the podcast?

The podcast “Convince Us” was Cory and I probably in his backyard drinking a beer thinking “What could we do that’s unique?” We wanted to start a podcast, we wanted to hang out. I’d moved back from Germany and the podcast forced us to hang out. 

We both decided there is a big hole for conspiracy theories, there’s plenty out there, but we didn’t want to make fun of the people that support it, we just wanted to talk about it and poke holes at it. My dad was a big conspiracy guy and Cory’s dad was too, so we had all these conspiracies at our kitchen table. We took it from that and we wanted to make a show about conspiracies our dads would be interested in and also laugh at. They might still believe it but they could laugh about it with us. 

Eventually the podcast changed to “The Most Uninteresting Men in the World.”

We started running out of conspiracies — there are a lot more now — and we were getting really tired of it. Some of the conspiracies were really dark and weird. While Cory was moving up the ranks in his company he was meeting all these interesting people and we’d talk about it in his backyard and be like, “Man we are boring compared to these people,” and then we were like, “Let’s just interview them.” They’re not famous but they’ll have cool stories. 

We interviewed a rock climber who climbed El Capitan, thousands of people have but how many random people do you get to hear from? We interviewed a guy who won the cycle cross. He was the world champion at 14 years old. We interviewed a presidential candidate named Mark Charles who was Native American. He was running to be the president. He only got like 2% but it was the first time in a long time that a Native had actually run an effective campaign. The Native American vote really rallied behind this man.

We interviewed B- and C-level celebrities but they had interesting stories and interesting lives. It was fun. 

Aside from that, and when you're not teaching, what are your interests and hobbies?

As I’ve gotten older I’ve wanted to work my body out more, so I’ve gotten back into rock climbing. Woodworking too, I have a little shop at my house and I do a lot of that. My son is 16 and he plays tennis at his high school so I’ll do that with him and hit the ball around. My daughter is 14 and she's a little thespian so she likes to act in plays. She just picked up her first lead role so it’s fun to run lines with her. 

At a Glance:

Who: Colin Lyons

Occupation: Middle School Teacher

Education: University of Oregon Masters in Curriculum and Teaching, Secondary Education and Teaching. Bachelors in History and Political Science.

Hometown: Springfield, Oregon

Family: Wife, two kids, cat, three chickens and a bunch of fish.

Hobbies: Podcasting, rock climbing, woodworking, spending time with family.