Falls Church City Public Schools (FCCPS) is an excellent, award-winning school division in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Objective student achievement data alone doesn’t tell the whole story of who we are as a division and community. The following anecdote, or story, provides a story, and fuller picture of what makes FCCPS special from my unique perspective.
School starts in August now, two weeks before Labor Day, so that is when we start getting to know our students. We used to start on the day after Labor Day; that was the case when I started teaching in 2012, and I believe it had been like that back when I started Kindergarten as a student at Mount Daniel in 1994. That was about a year after my parents moved my brothers and me into Falls Church City, having learned about its reputation for a challenging school system. All three of us were and are “lifers,” attending FCCPS from Kindergarten until graduating from (then) George Mason High School.
However, two months before school started this year, I got to know some graduates from much earlier than that, all the way back to the 1950’s. In 2021, I was approached by a member of the Class of 1961, who had helped found the high school’s alumni association in 1989 (which happens to be the year I was born). She asked me to help continue the alumni association, including planning an all-class reunion for the summer of 2024. I worked with alumni from the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s to plan a school tour and an evening party. On Friday that weekend, I spent most of the time with fellow Mustangs older than me. However, on a Saturday evening, I ended up having some memorable times with some who were actually in the school at the same time I was, although not in my class.
Speaking of my class, the Class of 2007, while I occasionally grab a beer with someone who happens to be in town, I am most frequently in contact with one friend. We go way back, thick and thin, through middle school, first girlfriends, lacrosse, Halo parties, college, grad school, and adulthood. I’ll be honored to have him as a groomsman at my wedding this summer.
My wedding! As if I’m not already entrenched enough in Falls Church, I’m marrying my fellow high school science teacher. We’ve kept our relationship fairly low-key, so some people find out incidentally. There may be people reading this who already know, as well as people who are learning for the first time. The same is true for our students; some know, and some don’t know. Those who find out get a pretty big kick out of it. For example, I haven’t balked at taking advantage of this by asking some of the players she coaches to help me deliver birthday cupcakes.
Her sport is soccer; mine is lacrosse. I played lacrosse as a Mustang in high school and started coaching in the spring of my first year of teaching. I wound my way from assistant on varsity to head coach of JV to eventually becoming head coach of varsity and head of the program in 2021. Along the way, I’ve been blessed to have the support of some excellent athletic directors. I’ve had the advice and advantage of a singular athletic trainer. I’ve had several coaches give their time and effort to the program and help it grow to new heights. I’ve had team parents work exceptionally hard to care for gear, meals, and festivities. Lastly, I’ve had talented, motivated, competitive, and coachable players who have made every single season memorable in their own way.
It’s a joy to get to know the players through sports, but the core of what I do at FCCPS is that I reach the most students through science teaching. As a rookie teacher, I got a favorable IB and Honors Biology schedule. Like almost all teachers, I experienced a steep learning curve in those first few years but was aided by an adept department leader, a dedicated mentor, and patient, kind colleagues.
In those days, it was school policy to give an exam at the end of each semester, worth 20% of the semester grade (just over ten years later, that seems strangely high-stakes!). I remember getting into a communication mishap while attempting to advise my students on how to study for this exam. I meant to convey that students would need to go beyond recall and apply their knowledge in new contexts, but it came across as me saying that there would be material on the exam that wasn’t on the study guide. A long-time school counselor helped me meet with a student and her parent to clarify the situation. Ultimately, this student achieved an excellent grade and even went on to take IB Biology with me.
A few years later, I got certified in chemistry and started teaching one, then two, and then three sections combined with the biology I started with. Eventually, I completely converted. This tends to happen to science teachers. One of the most common questions I get from curious students is which I like more – biology or chemistry. Usually, I say that I like them both because both have a certain appeal to me. The answer, however, is inextricable from the students who take the classes. In my early years, it was freshmen taking biology, just out of middle school, needing a little smoothing down the edges as they became high schoolers. Nowadays, most students walking into my classroom for chemistry are sophomores, in the full sense of that term. They impress me with their maturity at one turn and then make me shake my head and laugh at their goofiness the next.
Whether biology or chemistry, in my 13 years and counting, I have always had at least one IB class of juniors or seniors. In these environments, I am inspired by students transforming into young adults. As they assiduously plan for their futures beyond FCCPS, I try to remind them that grades and acceptances do not determine their worth and that I do not expect perfection but simply an honest try. This may seem rich coming from their teacher in an advanced academic class, but I hope it at least makes some small difference in their stress.
As the year goes along, I get to know my students to the point that the classroom starts to feel familial. I ask them about their games, concerts, and theater productions. They learn what to expect during class and how to get their work done. They also learn how to get me off-topic by discussing sports, TV shows, or movies. They and I work hard, and that contract keeps us in rhythm.
During the Winter break of my first year of teaching, I was asked at a party if teaching was my “forever job.” Like me, my friends who were just out of college were doing various things, some in jobs, some doing government fellowships, some earning PhDs. At the time, calling it my forever job sounded like putting myself in a box, like leaving things unexplored. Whenever I got versions of this question, I equivocated for the first few years, saying I would see how the next few years went. Now, however, I’m more comfortable saying that I see myself here and have no plans to leave.
It’s not that it isn’t a bit grueling. Every year, as spring comes to an end and the weather heats up, I start looking forward to the end of the school year and summer break. These couple of months away from the classroom are refreshing, but as cheesy as it sounds, by the last few weeks, I have started to look forward to being back in the classroom. Nothing is guaranteed, but FCCPS is home, it’s a place I feel supported by administration and the community, and most of all by my students. When I go to the grocery store, I see students. When I go to the dog park, I see students. When I go out to eat, I see, and sometimes even am waited on, by students. For some, this might seem a bit too much, like work and life crammed together a little too tight, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. There may be many small towns across the country where this can happen to a young man who becomes a teacher, but for me, it happened in Falls Church City.