Transcription of Steve DeAngelis for the show Rethinking Education #190
Lisa Belisle: Given that my mother is a teacher, I always enjoy and of course that I’ve had lots of education myself and many fine teachers, I always enjoy having people on the show who are themselves teachers and have dedicated their lives to this very important field. Today, we’ll be speaking with Steve DeAngelis, who is a science teacher, Nordic ski coach and half time Dean of student at Maranacook in Readfield. Thanks so much for coming in and talking with us today.
Steve DeAngelis: Well, thanks for letting me come. It’s nice of you.
Lisa Belisle: I’m really impressed with your memory of Nordic ski history. It goes back almost as far as my graduation from high school and that says a lot because it was a while ago. I graduated in ’88 and you’re remembering people that used to ski on the team that I was with at Yarmouth.
Steve DeAngelis: That’s because they used to squash us like bugs and so they were really good. They were our idols. When I first started coaching skiing, Bob Moore had been at it for a while at Yarmouth and he still is, which is pretty impressive. If you want to talk about someone who’s been around a long time, but the Yarmouth were the teams that when I first started coaching we were in last and they were in first and we always … That was our model that we were going to emulate them, so we got to the point where we could compete with them pretty successfully, so that’s good.
Lisa Belisle: Yeah, you actually have done a great with the Maranacook group, and it’s some that … I guess why I’m impressed with this is that, I mean, this is a decade’s long project that you’ve been working on. Why Nordic skiing?
Steve DeAngelis: Belisle, I’ve coached other sports as well, but I stuck with Nordic skiing for a couple of reasons. One is I love being outdoors and it’s still something I can do with them every day. I’m here to practice every day, I’m skiing with the kids and that’s hard to do that. As a basketball coach my age you really not allowed run up and down the court very much with the high school kids as if you’re playing it, but I can still ski with most of them except the very fastest ones now, but … That’s always been a big part of it.
The other reason is really related to how much I love teaching because teaching and coaching are really the same thing in different places and for me coaching is, especially Nordic skiing is a great way to teach some of the life lessons that I want my kids to learn. It’s a sport that requires intrinsic motivation to be good at. Nobody comes out for Nordic skiing because they’re like, “I’m going to be in the front page of the paper. There are going be big crowds cheering.” No, if you’re a Nordic skier in Maine and you’re really successful, your parents and a couple of other people might be there at race and when you cross the line you’ll drool coming out of your mouth and big snot thing coming down your chin probably and if did a really good race. It could be 20 below zero and you’re still out there skiing in this great windshield or whatever.
You have to be intrinsically motivated. You also have to deal with the elements. Whatever you’re given on a given day, it’s not the same. Every basketball gym is pretty close the same. The rims are the same height and so forth, but every trailer is different, the weather is different, the wax is different. You name it, it’s all different and you have to adapt.
Those are great life lessons. The other cool thing about Nordic skiing it makes me crazy passion about it is that it’s a neat blend of individual and team. We always better I think because we work incredibly well with the team. It’s a tradition on our team that the older kids work with the younger kids. At the start of the season, we have 40, 50 kids in the team and I’m often the only person there, the only adult. They know that if we’re going to get better, they have to teach the younger kids and so that’s part of the tradition. That builds great teamwork, but also we have a full range out of those 40 kids that we had this year, there were some who had never been on skis before ever and other kids who were going to be State champions this year.
Out of that whole range it’s really great to work with kids to have them meet their own individual goals as well. Their individual goal don’t have to be to the State champion. It can be to make through a race without falling, and it’s awesome to watch kids grow and change in a way that is almost without public notice. That’s it’s all within themselves and I think that’s an awesome thing to learn how to do to reach those kinds of goals.
Lisa Belisle: You’re now in the off season for skiing and you’re still very busy because you’re still a teacher, you’re still a halftime Dean of students. How do you stay physically active?
Steve DeAngelis: That’s a good question. It’s not always easy to do all the kind of endurance training that I want. I undoubtedly spend much longer time without skiing or running if I didn’t have the job I have, so it’s a trade off, but I work it into other things that I do like we have a little sugar house we built back at the house in Readfield. We just got down, we had our last boiling this last weekend. It’s got too warm now, but I was thinking about … Just last week I was out carrying these five gallons buckets of sap through the woods, through two feet of slow on snow shoes.
You wouldn’t say I’m going out for a workout, but you getting a workout; a really good workout and so I think a lot of what I get to do I build it in little bit as part of our daily routine. We have a little land in Readfield and we have a Christmas tree farmer who grow young charismas farm. That works out great because all the work for that’s in the summer time, a lot of mowing and walking in the woods for that. We have a wood lot we cut our own firewood and I split with my hand because I like to do it.
It just fits in the flow of life. It helps me to stay relatively fit that way. My kids like to tease me that I’m really skinny and weary and look a little bit, but I have an old man strength.
Lisa Belisle: Old man’s strength.
Steve DeAngelis: Which comes from just doing stuff.
Lisa Belisle: I commended to you as you were coming in that you do look remarkably youthful considering that you have been coaching as long as I … Because far back is when I was …
Steve DeAngelis: You don’t have to keep going, I know the far back part as much. You can light up on that a little bit, probably. I’m just teasing.
Lisa Belisle: But, my … but Bob Moore, so you already mentioned my ski coach, I mean, he was doing it long before I got there, he’s still doing it. He looks pretty much the same …
Steve DeAngelis: He really does.
Lisa Belisle: … When I see him now he looks pretty much exactly the same.
Steve DeAngelis: He’s had that gigantic mustache forever. He looks very the same and he’s still out there skiing too with the kids. He’s done amazingly well. It’s an awesome sport. I keep going back to it, but great stuff.
Lisa Belisle: It is a great sport. You also have quite a lot of educational background yourself in addition to your Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering from the University of Maine in Orono. You also have a Masters of Education in Counseling from Orono. You’ve lots of … You’ve done science, you’ve done counseling, there’s education piece, so you … In addition to this physical thing that you do with the skiing you’re also … You have this intellectual aspect of you as well. Talk to me about how that whole progression was made. Chemical engineering is a very difficult major. Why did you decide to go from there to education, to teaching, counseling. How did that all come together?
Steve DeAngelis: That’s an awesome question actually. That’s a great question. I graduated from Maine with a Chemical Engineering degree like you said and I worked for, what at the time Scott Paper Company in, first in Winslow and then up near Skowhegan. They were doing a startup of a mill there at the time and it was really interesting work, really challenging, super financially rewarding. Very intense because we’re doing the startup, but then after a couple of years; it was just about less than two years, it felt … It really hard to describe, but I just felt that I wanted to be doing something more for other people than I was, which really hadn’t occurred to me a great deal going through high school and college. I loved science, I loved the nerdy stuff. Loved thinking about and figuring out things like math. Just … My dad was involved in the science field, and so it just made sense to me, I’m just going to do that end of the …
In all honesty, I just did it because I was good at it. It made sense to me and then I started looking around at my job after a couple of years and I remember … I still remember just thinking there this older fellow who had been there for a number of years working for Scott, I don’t know where that place. He … I asked him. He didn’t seem that interested in his job so I asked him, “Why are you still doing this for?” He started just thinking about … All of a sudden they got the golden handcuffs on me, which just meant … He said if I quit this job my wife would not to get to drive the car she does. My kids … The golden handcuff and just still resonates with me, I don’t want golden handcuffs.
I started looking around just really with no idea and, of course, no internet at the time. This is back as you pointed out a long time ago, and so I was looking in one day at stuff like, I was reading the Sunday and I saw a picture of the Principal at Maranacook School. It had just started up in 1976, this was in ’78. He was sitting in the hall with his arm around a kid and I’m like, “That does not look like the Principal of my high school.”
Just interested me, I tucked it away. Just … Two weeks later I saw an ad this was in early august for a chemistry teacher at Maranacook and I’m like, “How hard can that be. I’m a chemical engineer. I can teach chemistry.” When I look back I was incredibly arrogant to think … Because, I mean, I’m a big bad chemical engineer. In education major you had it so soft in college that is what I was thinking.
I applied for just on a whim. I had never had an education course in my life, never student taught, so I’m like they’re not going to interview me. They call me up, they asked to come interview and it a pretty experimental place … The open school concept and were willing to take risks and they took a giant risk. I remember they called me back two days later after this grueling interview and I thought that’s over and done with. They called me back and offered me the job and I seriously asked if they had the wrong number. I thought they had called the wrong person.
They said, “No, you are the one we’d like to offer this job to.” It was just a gut feeling I said I’m going to take it and this was two weeks before school started in August. I took that job and it was the hardest thing I’d ever done. Talk about an awakening, I was like, “Really, that’s what it’s like.” it was brutally hard, in part because I had never student taught, never had an education course in my life, but I had an awesome, a wonderful department chair who really helped pull me along for the first couple of years. I got lucky I got hooked in with some other physics teachers up in Montville, Mike Gunson was one of them who had been doing it for a lot longer and they taught me a lot more about the teaching aspect of it not just the content.
I started a lot teaching chemistry, but then like a lot of things when you teach something, you can really all of sudden like a light goes on and the first year I teach one physics course, which was the hardest thing for me as an engineer. I never … Even though I was successfully working as an engineer I didn’t really totally get it.
Taught that for a year and about halfway through the year I remember thinking that’s how this works? I totally get that, so then I just fell in love with physics, started doing that all the time and would up doing a lot of work over the summers and continuing education with physics. Now, when I teach that’s all I teach is physics. It’s a … That’s the short version.
Lisa Belisle: A short version.
Steve DeAngelis: It’s a lot longer, but I’ll give you the short version.
Lisa Belisle: How about this Masters of Education in Counseling. Why the counseling piece?
Steve DeAngelis: Well, because Maranacook has an awesome advisor system. A really wonderful thing where each teacher in the building and most of the administrators even have a group of 10 to 12 students that they follow through, they take them as ninth graders and follow them through to 12th grade. It’s not just in home room you do … You have days out with them, you do a number of extended activities beyond just a home room every day.
The other key piece that I think sets Maranacook apart, I think it’s the reason I’ve stayed there is I feel that we do a great job of educating the whole person, really paying attention to helping them become mature adults. We’re communicating work with other people. Things that go beyond just the content of your courses and I felt that if I was going to go a real … If the first couple of years, I thought if I’m going to be really good advisor, I’ve got a chemical engineering degree, no education background, I got to learn so more, so I took a leave of absence for a couple of years and got a counseling degree mostly to help me to be a better advisor then I came back.
Lisa Belisle: How does that help you with your Dean of students’ position that you do halftime?
Steve DeAngelis: A great deal as it turned out. I always resisted that for a long time. I’ve been there since 1978 and so with the exception of two years off to get my Masters in Counseling and so for … As I got older and I’d been around people kept asking me do you want to be Principal? Do you want to go into administration? I always said no because I really love working with the students, with kids. Teenagers are … They keep me vibrant, they’re … It’s the best and it’s still the best. I love working with teenagers.
Then about three and a half, four years ago now … Yeah, three and a half years ago, one of the two Deans of students opened up. We had half time Dean of students so that … Because we feel it’s important that the people in that role also stay in touch with the teaching side of things, so rather than having a full time Assistant Principal we have two Deans of Students’ who are both halftime and teach half time. We share the Dean of students part.
Nobody from in-school applied for it. They went and opened it up to outside of the school and I just felt like we needed to have someone who knew the way the school operated and … do it. I didn’t really … Not because I wanted to, I still was pretty convinced I was not a good idea. I really … And I miss the teaching still, but it’s turned out to be a really good thing for me because that’s where the counseling piece comes in. I really spend … When I teach physics, I spend half my time with students who really for the most part love school. They’re into school they’re good at school. They get it, they like it … spend the time at.
My Dean of students role, I spend half my time a lot of kids who really don’t like school. Who school’s a struggle for them for various reasons and my thinking about that part of the job is I don’t want to be seen as the Assistant Principal who is the head knocker. Who’s out there knocking heads to get people … I want to be as proactive as possible, so my goal is to get to know all the students that I work with as before they get in trouble, so you have a relationship first.
When a kid’s doing something that they shouldn’t be doing you have to call them on it. You call on them on it the same way you can call your own children on something because you love them, because you want them to be successful and you know that if they can just get around and do whatever they want, that’s going to be struggle for them at some point.
I try to be as proactive as possible in that job. Get to know the kids first, get to hit off issues, so … One of my crowning achievements after doing it for a couple of years is one of the students in our … program. His teacher overhead him say, “Man, I will just crack that kid except Mr. D would found out about it before I ever did anyway, so there’s no point.” I was like, “Yeah, that’s awesome.” Because he just said that he knows I’m looking, he knows I care about him, he knows that … It’s proactive stuff , that can happen, that’s best and that counseling part.
Lisa Belisle: I’m thinking about the parallels between education and health. Obviously, health is what I’m in and I’m a family doctor. You’ve come to a place where there is common core standardized testing, no child left behind. Medicine has come to a place where we’re asked to uphold certain standards. We’re constantly being evaluated not only on whether we’re good at being doctors, but whether we’re good at talking to our patients.
Ultimately, in both cases, we are … It’s hard for us to be measured on relationships and yet those end up being probably the most important part of both fields, so how do you stay focused on the importance of the relationship when what you’re being told from the outside is we need you to meet these external goals that we think are important?
Steve DeAngelis: In a way I’m lucky because I have been teaching for a long time and I know in my heart what works. I know that if your students know … I mean, the most important thing for a teacher is to be passionate about your subject and what you teach and passionate about kids because if your kids know, if your students know you care about them, you want to do your very best for them. That empowers them, that motivates them and without that, you can have the best standards in the world, all kinds standard testing, and it’s not going to work for you. You got to have that relationship.
That’s the … Another key part about being a teacher is just being to meet kids where they. To connect with them and understand why this kid is learning if differently than someone else. That takes time that takes that relationship building and I know that if you can do that that’s the starting piece.
Then, I really think that … I like the idea of common core by the way … Well, at least as it applies to science certainly. I don’t as much as about it for English and math, although certainly our teachers are working hard on that, but what’s called the next generation science standards were just adopted actually by Maine. They’re great. It’s basically saying these are the things that people that really know the field think are most important to learn. I like that part. Where I really very seriously differ is our emphasis on doing lots and lots of standardized testing to prove that we’re teaching that because it’s take time away from teaching and it the emphasis away from … It puts the emphasis too much on content and not enough on knowing how to figure stuff out and how to learn because that’s my big goal with my students is when I teach physic I’m thinking less about it’s important that you know these equations and this content. In fact, we don’t have memorized equation they always want to …As we learn new equations we put them up on a big poster, it’s on the wall. Now … Do we have to memorize that? No, you need to know how to use them.
What’s most critical I think is that we teach people not the content so much, but how to learn and how to figure things out because you know a whole bunch of content you can’t possible know all the content in the world nobody can, so if you’re working on something and it’s something you’re not familiar with and you don’t know how to learn. You don’t know how to figure stuff out, that’s a problem. That’s really the emphasis I think needs to be on that but the relationships come first.
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Lisa Belisle: You’re not originally … Your family is not originally from Maine?
Steve DeAngelis: That’s correct.
Lisa Belisle: When you’re 12 your dad came to Maine for a job. You love Maine. You got job offers in other States. Why did you stay here?
Steve DeAngelis: Like a lot of things I’m not a big believer in super simple solutions to anything or explanations. There’s a lot of reasons, but I remember that we came to Maine, we came from Virginia and we came in the middle of the Winter. A week after we got here, we had landed the biggest snowstorm in the history of the State of Maine and we got out of school for a week.
I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I was like, “You got to be kidding me. This must happen all the time,” which it doesn’t, but still that just right then and there I just fell in love in being in the snow. I love the snow, I love being outdoors and Maine is a great place to raise a family. One reason I stayed when you said I didn’t go for jobs in other States, I wasn’t looking to raise a family. I wasn’t married at the time when I first got to college, but I just thought to myself this is … As I looked at some of the other places I got job offers; New Jersey and Pennsylvania and some places in … It just …Maine was clearly in my mind a great place to raise a family and I thought someday I want to raise a family.
Lisa Belisle: Now you have …?
Steve DeAngelis: Now, I have three children who are just wonderful. Hanna, my oldest at 25. She’s been working in Boston. She got out Colby college in 2012. She’s been working in Boston for a few years, but she’s moving back to Portland this summer which is great. We’re excited about that. She hopes to … She’s … In the tutoring counseling field right now and I think she’s going to hopefully go USM and get her Masters in Counseling.
My son, Tyler is a senior at Boden. He’s going to graduate in about a month and after spending next winter in Europe skiing; he’s on the Nordic ski team at Boden right now. I’m pretty confident he’s going to be back around Maine also.
My son, Luca is a junior in high school and he’s also a Nordic skier and wants to go skiing in college, then he wants to be Secretary of State somebody, so maybe when I’m a benevolent dictator he can be Secretary of State, although I know benevolent dictators really need such a thing.
My wife, Tara is amazing and she is a counselor in the elementary schools towns in our district and it’s a great place to raise kids when … I still remember when Luca was in middle school, we’re driving home from school one fall day it was just beautiful. We drove right by the end of the lake and this fall … “Dad, we live in a place where other people come for vacation.” The kids all get it, I get it. It’s a great place to live for a lot of reasons, but you love the outdoors, it’s a great to live.
Lisa Belisle: Well, I agree with you and I appreciate all the work you’re doing. All the students you’ve helped teach and counsel. All the kids that you’ve helped coach. It’s something that … I’m very glad that you listened to the guy who told you about the golden handcuff and you didn’t develop, you didn’t get your pair of golden handcuffs and you decided you were going to be a teacher. I think you’ve made an impressive mark on the field.
Steve DeAngelis: Thank you very much, but you have to know I get a tremendous amount back from kids and parents and I … Pretty fortunate in that way.
Lisa Belisle: We’ve been with Steve DeAngelis who is teacher, a Nordic ski coach and a half time Dean of Students. Also, husband, father of three, enthusiastic promoter of the greater Readfield’s and I really appreciate you taking the time to come in and talk to me today.
Steve DeAngelis: Well, thank you. It’s been a lot of fun actually. I appreciate it.
Lisa Belisle: You’ve been listening to Love Maine Radio, Show Number 190, Rethinking Education. Our guests have included Zeo Weil and Steve DeAngelis. For more information on our guests and extended interviews, visit lovemaineradio.com. Love Maine Radio is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s show, sign up for our e-newsletter and like our Love Maine Radio Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter and see my running travel, food, and wellness photos as Bountiful 1 on Instagram. We love to hear from you, so please let us know what you think of Love Maine Radio. We welcome your suggestions for future shows. Also, let our sponsors know that you’ve heard about them here. We are privileged that they enable us to bring Love Maine Radio to you each week.
This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. I hope that you have enjoyed our Rethinking Education show. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.