“I don’t think he should teach.”
That’s what Professor of Teacher Education Deborah Butler heard about one of her students from a colleague in the math department in the late 1980s.
“I’d seen this student as a junior, then a senior, and this professor, whom I respect, came to me and said, ‘I don’t know what to do about this guy. He comes to class, wears his cap down over his eyes, and he’s just barely there, just doing okay work.’
“But I hadn’t seen him like that in my class: He talked up, he knew the math, got his plans ready. He wasn’t great at it, but, I thought, let’s just see how he does.
“Then he got to student teaching. It was like he just blossomed. As if he had been waiting three-and-a-half years to do this, doing the required work and showing up just so he could have this moment. It’s not that he wasn’t interested in math. But this was the way he was going to show what he knew; he was going to shine through his teaching. And he did. Years later, he still is.”
Such moments are one reason why Butler has worked so hard for over 26 years—the first 16 of those as the only professor in her department—to prepare Wabash men to step to the front of the classroom.
“We ask a lot of our students, even those considering teaching as one of several options,” says Butler. “We say to them, ‘Be serious enough to show us what you’re made of, show us you know your content and can engage and involve younger kids in it. And if you decide that you don’t want to teach, at least not now, I’m fine with that. I think we’ve helped educate you as a good parent, a good citizen who will know what a teacher goes through. And we’ve deepened your understanding of your own field of study—you never know if you really know something until you try to teach it!’”
Butler’s philosophy for the department carried teacher education at Wabash beyond professional preparation and into an opportunity for students to engage others with what they’ve learned.
“We offer this praxis—moments to connect the theoretical to what’s really going on out there,” Butler says. Her students have not only studied, but taught—well before their student teaching semester—in inner-city classrooms in Chicago, under-funded schools in Quito, Ecuador, and open-air huts in the Amazon River basin. They use teaching to explore the world and apply their liberal arts education long before Commencement, whether or not they decide to take teaching jobs.
“Knowing what I was like as an undergraduate, and knowing so many undergraduates over my career, I don’t think you have to make up your mind in four years.”
Butler speaks from experience. She knows better than most that finding one’s vocation is rarely a straight path. Even as she steps away from Wabash this year, her post-retirement plans are a “you’re kidding!” moment, at least for those who do not know her well.
“The first thing I remember wanting to be was a scientist,” Butler says, looking back on her life and teaching career from her office in Forest Hall. “I loved the outdoors, and I would lie on my stomach in my parent’s backyard with my Weekly Reader turned to Science in Your Own Backyard. And I would grub around, looking for stuff in the dirt. There were all these wonderful little creatures that you never thought about.”
When she was 11 years old she found a clowder of stray cats wandering into the neighborhood and brought them into a playhouse her father had built.
“One of the cats had kittens, and I gave one of the kittens a bath. I didn’t know any better. And the kitten got sick, so I took it to the vet, but it never got well.”
It was a heartbreaking lesson that made the little girl determined to become a veterinarian. For the next three years her dreams ran on parallel tracks—science and reading. Learning about animals and writing stories. Even a short novel or two.
“I even started my own neighborhood newspaper, sold subscriptions door-to-door.” Butler laughs. “I loved the writing.”
Then she hit what she describes as “a very gendered adolescence.”
“As a girl, I had never thought about whether what I did was appropriate for a boy or a girl. Everyone just encouraged me to do whatever I liked. But suddenly as a burgeoning young woman, people cared. There were a set of things I needed to do, needed to like, needed to model myself after.”
Her father nixed her idea of becoming a veterinarian.
“He knew I was very smart and he was proud of that, but he thought that I was probably going to get married, that I would need survival skills if that marriage didn’t work out.
“So I could be a secretary, manage an office, be a businesswoman, or be a teacher. The science and writing sort of went away. And my English teachers made us feel like if you couldn’t write college-level essays, there was something wrong with you. They never prized any other writing.
“I look back on it and see that not only had I little voice in my future, but I was losing my voice in what I had been passionate about. Like I was living someone else’s life, and that life was a dull ache.”
It would take years for Butler to get that voice back. Married at age 18 and a mother before she was 20, she was able to find grants and loans to earn a B.A. in English and a license to teach.
Then she found herself up front in the classroom.
“The first year they ran all over me. I went back and said, ‘This is not happening again. I’m going to teach English and they’re going to at least pretend they like it.’ So I was totally miserable, probably the strictest teacher in the entire school. I wouldn’t even let people turn their heads to whisper to each other!
“By the third year, I had a reputation. People knew they needed to take me seriously. I loosened up a little bit. I had a good cadre of other teachers and we would talk about open teaching, the power of the student in the classroom. That kind of hooked me, because if someone could have opened things up for me and let me have a voice when I was a student, it might have changed my life. So that’s how I taught for two more years.”
At the University of Virginia for her Ph.D. in English education, Butler wrote her dissertation on writing anxiety. Though she still struggled with it herself, she discovered ways to help others overcome it.
By the time she came to Wabash in 1985, the national focus on education had shifted to accountability and standardized testing. Much of the freedom she’d enjoyed as a classroom teacher was being squeezed out, and standards for teaching in primary and secondary school were being narrowed.
“But my colleagues and administrators at Wabash seemed to believe I knew what I was doing. Their confidence was empowering. And the restrictions in the field weren’t so bad yet that I couldn’t bring my own ideas and my own set of passions and creativity to shaping the program.
“I didn’t change the structure much, but what we did inside of that structure really changed. I thought it was the right thing to do—to prepare liberally educated people, and to use that education to the utmost to enrich their teaching, using teacher ed to shape it and channel it.
“What I have found so lovely is to watch their development. When I watch them as sophomores, they may just screw up pitifully. But 90 percent of the time these guys are going to develop really well in their junior year.
“And what makes my day is when I’m out there when these guys are seniors in student teaching, and the teachers breaking them in say, ‘These Wabash guys are head and shoulders above the people we get from other schools.’”
That voice Butler lost as a young woman has been on its way back for years, encouraging others’ to find their own, and helping Wabash men shine through their teaching.
“I have these Wabash guys and I know how smart they are,” she says. “I want to unleash them on the world to do good things with kids.”
That “unleashing” now left to her successor, Michele Pittard, Butler is returning to the first dream she had as a young girl: science. More exactly, veterinary science. She has spent the last three years taking night classes to become a veterinary technician. She also hopes to take a creative writing class.
She credits students in teacher ed with helping her remain open to second chances.
“I think of myself as a young 61-year-old, and a lot of that is due to the fresh perspectives and many ways of asking questions I’ve encountered in students over the years. Each student asks them in a different way. The approach is always fresh, always makes me rethink everything I think I know. I’ll miss that freshness.”
Enough for Butler to consider finding a way to return to teaching “some time in the future.”
“As a veterinary tech, one of the things you can do is teach in the veterinary hospital. Who knows—someday I might be able to marry my love of teaching with my love of science, and bring them all together.”
She thinks for a moment and smiles.
“Then I’ll write about it.”
