Wednesday, September 30, 2026
Tuesday, September 29, 2026
Monday, September 28, 2026
Sunday, September 27, 2026
Saturday, September 26, 2026
Missouri Southern State University
I came back to Missouri Southern today for a football game, which is a sentence that sounds ordinary until I admit that I had not attended one here since middle school.
That seems almost impossible.
I spent six years of my life on this campus. My parents both attended here. My brother graduated from here. Years later, my brother and I returned to teach summer classes through Upward Bound. Missouri Southern has been present at so many stages of my life that I sometimes forget to notice it. It has become less a destination than part of the landscape.
Maybe that is what foundations are supposed to do. Once the building is standing, nobody spends much time looking at the concrete beneath it.
Walking the campus again today, however, I found myself thinking about just how much of my life rests here.
Missouri Southern began long before it became my university. In 1937, it opened as Joplin Junior College, a small institution created through the local public school system. There were only 114 students in the first class and nine faculty members. It was a modest beginning, but the underlying idea was ambitious: people in this part of Missouri should have access to higher education without having to leave the region to find it.
That idea has always seemed particularly appropriate for Missouri Southern.
It was not founded as a distant academic enclave or as an institution intended primarily for people arriving from somewhere else. It grew out of Joplin and southwest Missouri. It belonged to the community before it belonged to the state.
By the 1960s, the little junior college had outgrown both its name and its ambitions. Jasper County voters created a college district in 1964, and the school acquired the Mission Hills property on the eastern edge of Joplin. The land had once been part of a private estate and dairy farm. Soon, classrooms, laboratories, a library, residence halls, and athletic facilities began replacing pasture.
Missouri Southern was learning to become something larger.
That process of becoming would continue for decades.
The institution developed into a four-year college. Enrollment grew. New programs appeared. Buildings multiplied across the old farm. By the time my parents arrived in the 1980s, Missouri Southern had become an established part of higher education in southwest Missouri, but it was still a relatively young institution.
My parents came here along two different paths.
My mother completed her degree in education. She became a teacher, and in doing so established a professional path that would eventually become part of my own life.
My father did not graduate.
He left school early because he had a young family to support and needed to work full time. That distinction matters to me. It would be easy to tell the family story entirely through diplomas: my mother graduated, I graduated, my brother graduated. But that would leave out one of the more important lessons contained in my father's experience.
Education exists within life, not outside of it.
People come to universities carrying obligations with them. Jobs, children, money, illness, family, and simple necessity all follow students into classrooms. Sometimes those obligations win. My father's education at Missouri Southern ended before he intended it to, but leaving college to support his family was not the absence of responsibility. It was responsibility taking another form.
So Missouri Southern entered my life before I ever became a student here.
It was part of my parents' story first.
I grew up knowing that my mother had gone to college and become a teacher. Higher education was therefore never entirely abstract to me. Neither was teaching. They were things adults I knew had actually done. A university was not simply a collection of buildings somewhere beyond childhood. It was part of the machinery by which people built lives.
Then, in 2001, Missouri Southern became mine.
I enrolled at Missouri Southern State College.
That word—College—matters because it would not remain there much longer.
When I arrived, Missouri Southern was once again in the middle of becoming something else. The institution had already developed a distinctive international mission and expanded far beyond the junior college it had once been. In 2003, while I was still a student, Missouri Southern State College became Missouri Southern State University.
I entered a college and graduated from a university.
At the time, I am not sure I understood how neatly that change would eventually fit into the story of my own life. Students are remarkably bad at recognizing historical moments while living through them. Institutional transformation is difficult to appreciate when you are more concerned with finding a parking space, making it to class, finishing an assignment, or calculating exactly how poorly you can perform on a final examination and still keep the grade you want.
The sign changed.
The name changed.
We kept going to class.
Only later did I begin to understand what the change represented. Missouri Southern was claiming a broader identity, and I was doing something similar.
I came here still largely formed by the world of my childhood. I left with a Bachelor of Science in Education and a minor in geography, prepared to begin the long process of discovering what being a teacher actually meant.
The education degree had an obvious influence. Teaching became my profession and eventually the central work of my adult life. What I did not fully understand at the time was how deeply geography would remain with me as well.
Geography taught me to care about place.
Not simply where something is, but why it is there. Why cities develop where they do. Why roads follow certain paths. Why boundaries matter. Why landscapes change. Why communities build particular institutions and what those institutions reveal about the people who created them.
I suspect that is part of the reason I travel the way I do now.
I cannot simply pass through a town without wondering how it came to exist. I cannot walk across a university campus without wanting to know why the buildings are arranged as they are. A stadium is never only a stadium. A highway is never only a highway. A museum, courthouse, neighborhood, bridge, or old railroad grade becomes an invitation to ask how people shaped a place and how the place, in turn, shaped them.
Some of that curiosity certainly existed before Missouri Southern.
But this is where it was given language.
This is where I learned to examine the world rather than simply move through it.
My brother followed me through Missouri Southern and graduated in 2009 with his own Bachelor of Science in Education.
By then, the connection between our family and the university had become difficult to ignore. Both of our parents had attended. My mother had earned her teaching degree here. I had earned mine. My brother earned his.
Three of us became teachers.
There are family traditions that announce themselves loudly. Others develop almost accidentally until, one day, you look backward and realize that a pattern has been forming for years.
Ours seems to have involved classrooms.
One of the great pleasures of my adult life came when my brother and I returned to Missouri Southern to teach for Upward Bound during the summer.
The geography of the campus had not changed much, but my place within it had.
I was no longer walking into a classroom wondering what someone intended to teach me. I was walking in responsible for teaching someone else.
That reversal remains one of my favorite parts of my relationship with Missouri Southern.
There is something wonderfully strange about returning to an institution that helped form you and discovering that you have been invited to participate in the forming of someone else. My brother and I, once students here ourselves, were now standing at the front of classrooms.
The school had become part of us, and for a little while we became part of the school.
That is why returning today feels different from visiting almost any other university.
I enjoy university campuses. I seek them out when I travel. They tell stories about communities, architecture, ambition, money, memory, and the peculiar human belief that if we put enough books and young people together in one place, something useful might happen.
But this campus does not require interpretation from a distance.
I know it too well.
Walking Missouri Southern means crossing several versions of my own life at once.
Somewhere here is the child who knew the school because his parents had attended.
Somewhere here is the eighteen-year-old who arrived in 2001 without any real understanding of how long six years could be.
Somewhere here is the education major preparing to become a teacher without yet knowing what teaching would ask of him.
Somewhere here is the geography student learning to pay closer attention to place.
Somewhere here is my brother making his own way through the same institution.
And somewhere here are the two of us, years later, returning as teachers.
Today there is another version: the alumnus returning for a football game after an absence much longer than he intended.
The football itself almost seems secondary.
What mattered was being here.
Universities inevitably change. Buildings appear. Departments move. Programs begin and end. Administrators come and go. Old spaces acquire new purposes. Students discover shortcuts across campus that earlier generations somehow failed to identify. Someone eventually renames something, which guarantees that alumni will stubbornly call it by the old name for another thirty years.
Missouri Southern has been especially good at changing names.
Joplin Junior College.
Missouri Southern State College.
Missouri Southern State University.
Each name marks a different stage in the life of the institution.
My own relationship with the place has accumulated names as well.
Son of former students.
Student.
Graduate.
Teacher.
Alumnus.
None entirely replaces the one before it.
That may be why I feel such affection for Missouri Southern. I do not remember it as one fixed place from one particular period of my life. It has accompanied my family across generations and accompanied me across identities.
My father's story here reminds me that education and life do not always follow the same timetable.
My mother's story reminds me that an education can become a vocation.
My brother's story reminds me that family traditions sometimes emerge without anyone formally declaring them.
And my own story reminds me how much can grow from a foundation laid quietly years before we understand what is being built upon it.
I went on from Missouri Southern to graduate school, eventually earning graduate degrees and a doctorate. Those institutions matter greatly to me. They sharpened my thinking, expanded my professional life, and opened possibilities I could not have imagined when I first arrived here.
But Missouri Southern is different.
This is where the foundation was poured.
Before the advanced degrees, before the professional titles, before nearly two decades in education, there was a young man walking this campus trying to learn how to become a teacher.
Before him, there was his mother doing much the same thing.
And beside that story was his father, who stepped away from college because a young family needed him more immediately than a degree did.
Perhaps that is why the history of Missouri Southern feels so intertwined with my own.
The institution began small and local. It grew. It changed. It took on new responsibilities. It became something larger without entirely abandoning what it had been.
So did we.
Today I came back for a football game.
I stayed, at least in my mind, for everything else.
For the college my parents knew.
For the university I watched emerge.
For the classrooms where I learned.
For the classrooms where I later taught.
And for the strange realization that so much of the life I eventually built began on an old dairy farm in Joplin, Missouri, at a school that was still learning, just as I was, what it intended to become.
Friday, September 25, 2026
Thursday, September 24, 2026
Wednesday, September 23, 2026
Tuesday, September 22, 2026
Bird Garden (Vogelgarten) (1924)
Every year, near the beginning of the school year, I reread Jonathan Kozol’s Letters to a Young Teacher. I have been doing it long enough that the practice has become something like a ritual. The book appeared in 2007, the same year I began teaching, so it has accompanied nearly the whole of my professional life. I have changed considerably during those years. The words on the page have not. Yet somehow, each time I return to them, I find something I had not noticed before.
Perhaps that is what rereading does. We imagine that we are returning to the same book, but we never really are because we are no longer the same reader.
When I first encountered Letters to a Young Teacher, I was, quite literally, a young teacher. I had questions about classrooms, students, institutions, and the kind of educator I hoped to become. Nearly two decades later, I have accumulated considerably more experience, but I am not convinced that I have accumulated proportionately more answers. If anything, experience has made some questions more complicated.
That may be why I continue to need Kozol.
There is something important about the epistolary form of the book. Kozol is writing to a young teacher named Francesca, answering questions and responding to experiences that we encounter primarily through his side of the correspondence. We do not possess the conversation in equal measure. There is an absence on the other side of the page.
I have come to appreciate that absence.
It leaves a chair open.
Each year, I can sit down in it.
I can become the young teacher again and bring Kozol the questions I have accumulated since the last time I read him. The questions I brought in 2007 were those of someone beginning a profession. The questions I bring now belong to someone who has spent years inside it. They carry students I remember, students I worry about, mistakes I have made, successes I still do not completely understand, institutional frustrations, changing responsibilities, and the slow accumulation of experiences that we call expertise.
The danger of expertise, however, is certainty.
One of the passages I return to in Kozol concerns Paul Klee’s Bird Garden, painted in 1924. During Kozol’s early teaching in Boston, he displayed works of art for his students. He recalls being told that Klee was “too sophisticated for the children of this neighborhood.” He put Bird Garden up anyway.
The children loved it.
Kozol remembers the painting becoming an “instant favorite,” with students gathering around it when they passed. The adults had already decided something about the children. They knew the neighborhood. They knew their academic circumstances. They knew the difficulties surrounding their education. From that information, they believed they could predict the limits of what those children might understand.
Then the children stopped in front of Klee.
There is something profound in that small act.
They did not need to explain the Bauhaus. They did not need to know Klee’s place within European modernism or possess the vocabulary of abstraction. They did not have to write an analysis of the painting’s forms or explain the strange relationship between its birds, vegetation, symbols, and geometry.
They looked.
Something in the painting arrested their attention.
We sometimes make the mistake of thinking that because a child cannot articulate an experience in the language adults expect, the child has not had the experience. We confuse vocabulary with perception, academic fluency with intelligence, and explanation with understanding.
Art continually exposes the weakness of those assumptions.
Klee’s Bird Garden is particularly suited to the lesson. It is recognizably a garden, although no garden actually looks like this one. Birds inhabit an environment of branching forms, geometric structures, strange vegetation, and patches of color. Some birds announce themselves immediately. Others nearly disappear into the surrounding forms. The painting hovers somewhere between representation and symbol, as though Klee were less interested in showing us a garden than in showing us the idea of one.
A garden is nature, but it is cultivated nature. Someone prepares the soil, tends it, waters it, protects what is vulnerable, and creates conditions favorable to growth. But the gardener cannot command growth.
That distinction matters to me as a teacher.
Education is filled with attempts to predict human beings. We collect data. We identify patterns. We diagnose problems. We learn about trauma and poverty. We examine academic histories, disciplinary histories, disabilities, family circumstances, race, gender, language, and countless other dimensions of a student's experience. Much of this knowledge is necessary. Circumstances matter. They influence opportunity, behavior, belonging, and the ways institutions respond to children.
But circumstances are not destiny.
The great danger is that information intended to help us understand a student can become information we use to finish understanding them.
A child can become the trauma.
The poverty.
The reading level.
The referral.
The disability.
The reputation that arrived in the room before the student did.
Race and gender can become categories through which adults presume to know a young person rather than dimensions of an identity infinitely more complex than any institutional description can contain.
There is an ethical difference between recognizing the conditions shaping a person's life and believing those conditions tell us the limits of that person.
That is what I hear now in Kozol’s story about Klee.
Someone looked at the children and saw the neighborhood.
Kozol put the painting on the wall.
The children looked at the painting.
The latter act required trust.
It required Kozol to concede that he did not know beforehand what would happen between those children and that image. He could provide the encounter, but he could not control its outcome. In another passage, Kozol describes teaching as an opportunity to “bring joy and beauty, mystery and mischievous delight” into children’s lives. I increasingly think those things matter precisely because they cannot always be reduced to measurable outcomes.
Beauty does not need to justify itself with a learning objective before a child deserves access to it.
Mystery does not need to be differentiated according to reading level.
Wonder does not belong only to children whose circumstances adults have judged conducive to wonder.
Perhaps this is where Kozol’s title matters so much to me. Letters to a Young Teacher unmistakably echoes another book I return to repeatedly, Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. Rilke also writes across an asymmetrical correspondence, answering a young man who has approached him with questions about art, vocation, uncertainty, and life.
His most enduring counsel is also among the simplest:
“Live the questions now.”
I have loved that sentence for years, but I hear it differently when I place Rilke beside Kozol.
When I began teaching, I thought experience would answer my questions. In some ways, it has. I know infinitely more about teaching than I did in 2007. I understand institutions more clearly. I recognize patterns I could not have recognized then. I possess techniques, language, and judgment that only experience can produce.
But perhaps maturity in teaching is not finally measured by how many questions disappear.
Perhaps it is measured by which questions we refuse to stop asking.
Do I still believe that students can surprise me?
Do I still distinguish between understanding a student's circumstances and predicting a student's possibilities?
Can I recognize trauma without seeing only trauma?
Can I acknowledge economic disadvantage without assuming a poverty of imagination?
Can I recognize the significance of race, gender, disability, and identity without imagining that any category exhausts the person standing in front of me?
Can I encounter a student with a long disciplinary history without assuming I already know how the next chapter ends?
Do I still believe that young people deserve encounters with beauty, difficulty, mystery, and wonder?
After all these years, am I still willing to put Bird Garden on the wall?
That question has become the heart of Kozol’s story for me.
Putting the painting on the wall means accepting the limits of my own knowledge. It means admitting that there are dimensions of every student I will never see unless I create room for them to appear. It means resisting the professional temptation to transform patterns into prophecies.
It means trusting.
There is a particular humility required in that kind of trust because the teacher may never witness its consequences. A student may stop before the painting and say nothing. Something may happen internally that never becomes visible to me. A book, an image, a conversation, or a gesture may become important years later, long after the student has left my classroom.
Education contains enormous amounts of invisible work.
Perhaps that is another reason Bird Garden stays with me. Klee’s garden is crowded with life, but not all of that life announces itself equally. Some forms blaze against the background. Others require attention before they emerge. The fact that something is difficult to see does not mean it is absent.
The same is true of children.
And perhaps the same is true of teachers.
Every year, I return to Letters to a Young Teacher carrying another year of experience. I am no longer the teacher who first opened the book in 2007. I would not want to be. Experience ought to change us.
But I do not want experience to close me.
I want there always to remain something of the young teacher—the one who still has questions, who is still capable of being surprised, who has not become so fluent in the language of schools that he mistakes description for destiny.
Rilke tells me to live the questions.
Kozol reminds me whom those questions are for.
Klee gives me the image.
And so, at the beginning of another school year, I return to the book and take my place once more in the empty chair on the other side of Kozol’s correspondence. I bring different questions than I brought in 2007. Next year, I expect they will be different again.
But I hope one of them never changes.
Am I still willing to put Bird Garden on the wall?
I hope the answer is always found in the act of putting it there.
Monday, September 21, 2026
Sunday, September 20, 2026
Saturday, September 19, 2026
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