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Today's Featured Biography

Jack Troy

I attended West Chester from 1956-61 and did my student teaching with Mr. Lionel Jackson, where I was surprised to learn that teaching could be both challenging and rewarding in happy proportion on a good day. It all happened in a single class discussion about W. Somerset Maugham’s novel, The Moon and Sixpence – a fictionalized account of the painter Paul Gauguin’s life. Mr. Jackson felt that Gauguin’s decision to leave his family and a career in finance was reprehensibly irresponsible. Some members of the class, including me, felt Gauguin’s motives were essential for him to make peace on his own terms with “the world within and the world without.” During that exciting exchange of ideas, I remember thinking, “I could get paid for this if I taught?”

Because I had graduated in January, I worked on a mink farm and did substitute teaching outside Reading, while living with my parents, and eventually was hired, at $4100 per year, to teach at NP in the fall of ’61. In 1962 Jim Kietzman, NP’s art teacher, showed me how to make pottery, which changed my life by acquainting me with touch-based learning. Jim was the first Quaker I’d met and we had many meaningful discussions about Life in General. We were the best of friends until his death in the spring of 1963. I stayed at NP through the 1965 academic year, before heading for Bogota, Columbia, with my wife to teach in a bilingual school. From there we moved to Kent, Ohio, where I got my Master’s and came to Juniata College to direct the freshman comp program and teach American lit. I started a ceramics program, and in 1972 retired my tweed jackets and taught ceramics in the art department until 2006.

“Were you nostalgic about visiting you former students?” someone asked.
“No!” I replied, “But grateful,for sure.”
None of you could have known at the time, but you were all teaching me how to teach. It wasn’t a “job,” it was a “calling” – something one does with the whole self – and a source of energy. As the sub-salutatorian of my high school class, I was insecure about teaching people who were so much brighter than I’d been at your age, so I did my best and you helped me gain confidence that kept accumulating.

Thanks again, for the chance to get together. I’ll join you at your 60th reunion, in spirit, if not in body.

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