Interviews with the LCA: Mr. Talkington
By Michelle Zhou
A couple weeks ago, I had the opportunity to interview Mr. James Talkington, the Head of Upper School. Mr. Talkington has been a teacher at LCA for the past ten years. In past years, he has taught ninth and eleventh grade English as well as serving as the Director of Student Life. This year, he also teaches Advanced English Language and Composition for juniors. You may or may not know this about Mr. Talkington: he grew up in Japan, chocolate is his favorite ice cream flavor, and currently, one of his favorite writers is the poet Richard Wilbur. We were able to discuss a little bit about teaching, faith, and high school. Here are some of the questions I asked:
What are your responsibilities as Director of Upper School?
JT: I try to solve problems that students are having with their academics. If they need extra support because they’re gifted in a particular area and want to accelerate, I try to make sure their schedules work out so that could happen. If they’re struggling in other areas and need extra help, I try to get them with the resources they need. I also help teachers to become the best that they can be. I’m working with the high school teachers to make sure that what they teach (the curriculum) and how they teach are very strong.
How do you think your job differs from the Director of Student Life?
JT: This job to me feels like its primary focus is supporting the teachers and working with the teachers, what they teach and how they teach. The Director of Student Life is more directly supporting the students, helping them through their leadership skills, or helping them keep a disciplined focus on school. Also in that role, the Director of Student Life, Mr. Stevens, supports the teachers a lot, but he supports the teachers by first supporting the students. And in my role, I’m supporting the students by first supporting the teachers, so it’s two sides of the same coin, in a way.
When you were in high school, did you expect to become a teacher?
JT: I did not expect to become a teacher. I don’t know what I expected to become, but I did not expect to become a teacher. When I graduated from high school, I ended up going to a Bible college and studied Biblical Languages as my major, and I didn’t know what I was going to do with them. My parents were missionaries, but I didn’t think I’d be a missionary. I didn’t think I would be a pastor. When I finished college, I realized that I might become a teacher because I had a pretty academic degree, and there’s not a lot else you can do with Greek and Hebrew. Oddly enough, as you can tell, I’m not a Bible teacher. I went to graduate school and got a degree in Theology, but I still didn’t become a Bible teacher. I was trying to figure out if I wanted to get a PhD in Bible, and I thought, “You know what? I need to find out if I like to teach,” because if you get a PhD in Theology, you’ve got to be a teacher. You can be a writer, but you’re also going to have to teach, so I looked for jobs after I got my Master’s degree. I looked for jobs teaching in Bible, but I also knew that I had a lot of experience from part time jobs teaching and tutoring English throughout college and graduate school. The first job that I found was a full time English job, so that got me teaching English. Since then, I have gotten a degree in English as well.
So I know you’ve lived in Japan, did you grow up in any other countries as a missionary?
JT: Just in Japan. I moved to Japan when I was five years old with my parents, and my brother and sister. We only lived in Japan while I was in school. I spent one year in America my fifth grade year, I think, and then another year during my freshman year. But otherwise I was in Japan that whole time.
Do you think that’s been a defining cultural experience for you?
JT: I’m pretty sure. It’s hard to separate out who you are as a person, like who you would’ve been otherwise. I don’t understand a lot of parts of American teenage life, like getting a driver’s license, because I grew up in Japan where you could get around by train and had all this freedom on your own as soon as your parents would let you out of the house. I can’t understand what it’s like to be an American teenager where you’re tethered to your parents until you’re sixteen or whenever you get a driver’s license, and I have to tell you, I much prefer the Japanese way than the American way.
What are the downsides of being a teacher?
JT: There are a lot of upsides, but I won’t talk about those. The downsides of being a teacher… in some ways this is an upside too, but one of the things teachers have to be is a cheerful leader for what they’re doing. So every day I walk into the English classroom, I am a cheerleader for English. I need to believe—and my students to believe—that English is the most important subject, and I try to sell them on that. And you go through waves in your career of feeling like you can really sell that well. I’ve been teaching now for fifteen years and I’m still convinced that it’s the most important thing. But you’ve got to have this sort of energy and when you’re off, you’re guaranteed that class isn’t going to go so well. That, I think is a challenge.
How might the student dynamic also affect the way you teach?
JT: Every group of students is different, there’s no group of fifteen or sixteen or twenty students that’s the same: what makes them buzz or tick or fall asleep. Often it’s the same thing as the group that went before, but many times there’s something different and new that you need to figure out.
What are some things that you think your students over the years have taught you?
JT: My students teach me every class period how to read a text. It’s basic stuff. It’s no deep life lesson. I think that they’re collective minds of twenty, can tie me down fifty times over because I find things surprising and new when I’ve looked through a text for the tenth time and they’re looking at it for the first time. There’s seldom a discussion that I don’t come away finding something new and rich and deep and meaningful from that experience.
That must make teaching like a new experience.
JT: Well, it’s the thing that fights against the problem of teaching. I said that the problem of teaching is here you are, trying to be a cheerleader for this subject for the fifteenth year in a row, but when you’ve got bright students, they’re a class that is challenging, you think differently about a text. That’s fun! That’s what allows that energy to keep going.
How would you describe God’s role in your life, both as a person and as a teacher?
JT: The second one’s a lot easier. As a teacher I’m a Christian school educator, and for me, that means that all that I do, all the texts that we talk about, I’m able to talk about through a Christian perspective. It doesn’t mean that I attach a Bible verse to every single text. In fact, students will find that I almost never do that. It’s not because I don’t think that Bible texts are important, but the text we’re looking at is. Whatever it is, an essay or Huckleberry Finn or something, it engages the questions that are very central to who we are as humans. And as a Christian, I know that God has something to say about that. God created us to worship Him, and I find lots of joy in figuring out how different authors connect with that idea, and how they very often disconnect with how I view that. Their view of what a human’s role is, is far different than what I think God’s view is. I find that’s where God is in my career as a teacher.
In my life, I suppose it’s much more personal, and it’s about continuing dependence. I learn on most days about how weak and at fault I am. Some years ago, there was a politician who had been a wrestler, his name was Jesse Ventura. He was one of those professional WWE UF wrestlers who dress up in costumes. He amazingly became the governor of Minnesota, and he made this comment that he made not to be very flattering. He said, “Christians need God as a crutch in their life.” And I say yes. I 100 percent. He is exactly right. I don’t know why so many Christians took offense at that. I think it’s exactly what they need. So that’s how I feel personally.
What advice would you give to your high school self?
JT: I would advise me to just enjoy. I wish I had gotten more comfortable with myself before junior or senior year. Just to be comfortable with whoever I was even if it were awkward or odd or not very academically skilled. Until you’re comfortable with yourself, you’re not going to be able to figure out how to do better at school or how to do better personally with other people. That’s probably what I would say, but overall, I’d be pretty happy with how high school turned out for me. Those certainly weren’t the best years of my life, and I think one thing I would tell students today is don’t believe the lie that high school years are the best of your life and you’ve got a lot of years left that are going to be horrible. If you believe that, I’m sorry but that is not the case. I think each year is in many ways more challenging, but very often each year is more joyful than the previous one. So enjoy it, but not too much.
Do you believe that God reveals himself through your teaching and through your students? How do you see that?
JT: Probably in the ways that I’ve spoken about a little bit. Teaching is about understanding our world and trying to understand where God has put us in this world. So when we’re asking students to understand our world a little bit better, I think we’re asking them to understand God and this created world we live in. That’s a little piece of it in my role as a teacher.