By JAMES BELL
Hays Post
In third grade, Hays native Chuck Schmidt turned in a writing assignment and the teacher was so impressed he was told he could be an author someday.
After 33 years in education working as a teacher, coach, principal and superintendent, that day has finally come.
Schmidt recently published his first book “Tales from School: You Can’t Make This Sh*t Up!” and is currently promoting his work that shares his experiences in the classroom and as an administrator.
“This book has been a real labor of love,” Schmidt said. “I have been thinking about writing a book about my experiences for a long time, but never had the time to do it until I finally retired.”
The book is a chronological narrative recounting of many of his experiences throughout his career.
“I have had so many tremendous experiences good, bad, indifferent, funny, sad, tragic, whatever, I thought I ought to record this,” he said.
Schmidt hopes the book will be helpful to teachers and administrators entering the field of education.
“A lot of stories that I think would be really helpful to new teachers and new administrators, to see the things that I ran into and how I handled them,” Schmidt said. “Sometimes they can learn from my mistakes, and sometimes they can learn from my successes.”
While the book recounts stories from Schmidt’s career, he said it is not about him, but rather what he has learned over the years.
“It is not necessarily an account about my career, but it takes the experiences I have had in all of the different positions I have been in in education and then talks about the stories and experiences and some of the lessons you can get in that,” Schmidt said. “A lot of it is stories about some of what I see as successes where I might have contributed, some places where I have made mistakes and things did not turn out so well.”
The book runs the gamut of his career, covering his time as a coach, extracurricular activities, humorous recollections of interactions with students, challenging students, and his time returning as a sixth-grade social studies teacher after years of serving as a superintendent.
“I spent my last 14 years as a superintendent in two different places, and then after I retired as superintendent my successor called me in August and said, ‘Hey would you teach sixth-grade social studies because we can’t find a teacher?’ ” Schmidt said.
So he returned to the classroom after 22 years.
“It was at the same time, a terrifying and a gratifying and a heartwarming experience all at the same time.”
Returning to the classroom allowed Schmidt to compare teaching from the beginning of his career in 1972 to today, giving him valuable insights into how much has changed in the classroom.
Despite changes in technology, funding and administration, Schmidt said the importance of relationships with students remains crucial.
“In order to be a successful teacher or administrator, you have got to establish relationships with kids, you have got to show them that you care,” he said. “I think what I have seen in my career is that is even more important now.
“I think kids are smarter today than when I first started teaching, but they don’t know what to do with it because they don’t get as much guidance,” Schmidt said, noting several tough situations he observed with his students in recent years.
“That’s where a teacher becomes even more crucial today.”
Amazon publishing platform gives Schmidt outlet to share experiences
As any author knows, writing a book is only the first step in a long process of getting it into readers’ hands.
Schmidt shopped his manuscript around before deciding to self-publish on the Amazon publishing platform.
“They have a pretty good process,” he said.
But before you get to that point you have to have an editor, he said, and he found one for his book using an online service that connected him with a professor of English at Southern Arkansas University.
Layout and design of the cover was completed with the help of a Wichita cover artist who Schmidt met during a panel on self-publishing.
The artist had some help, though, as Schmidt’s 12-year-old granddaughter mocked up the cover idea that the artist used to make the final cover.
“It’s her concept,” Schmidt said.
With the book ready, Schmidt is now working on getting the word out and hoping new or future educators can value his insights from 33 years of education.
He has already hosted book-signing events in Independence and Topeka and was featured in the Topeka Capital-Journal.
He is also pushing the book through social media and in areas where he taught, with a Hays event to be scheduled soon.
Schmidt said he is also contacting schools of education in Kansas, with the hope that future educators may read it and use his stories as they embark on their own careers.
While completing his bachelor’s degree in secondary education at the University of Kansas in 1972, Schmidt said he remembers a first-hand experience of a teacher and found it to be more helpful than any textbook and hopes his book may be as helpful to new educators.
The book can be bought on Amazon in paperback form for $15 or as an e-book for $4.99
Time at Thomas More Prep-Marian shapes life in education
Schmidt credits much of his success, and the success of many others to Thomas More Prep-Marian, 1701 Hall.
“I had some great teachers, both in grade school and at Thomas More, which was St. Joseph’s Military Academy at the time,” Schmidt said.
One teacher stuck out to Schmidt as having a particular impact on his life and career; freshman English teacher James Traffas.
“He opened my mind,” Schmidt said. “I was just a farm kid from western Kansas at he started us reading Great Expectations and we read the Bronte sisters books and all of that stuff which was completely foreign to the life I had.”
“It opened my eyes and mind to the world.”
His class sparked Schmidt’s interest in education, but in general, he credits TMP with creating many notable alumni.
He noted several school superintendents attended the school as did former Kansas Gov. Jeff Colyer, author and journalist John L. Allen Jr., and executive Washington editor for The Wall Street Journal Gerald Seib.
“They challenged us so much. They challenged us to reach our potential,” Schmidt said.
Those challenges in turned pushed Schmidt to drive his own students, several of which are now superintendents as well.
“I think there was an atmosphere of striving to be the best you possibly can and we a lot of kids that went on and did that,” Schmidt said. “For me, that came from my teachers in grade school and high school.”
The culture that shaped Schmidt at TMP stuck with him and over the years he dreamt of coming back to Hays to serve as the principal and president at TMP, but as he moved through his career and accepted other challenges and opportunities kept his dream never came to pass.
Students success reward enough for former educator and author
Without a doubt, Schmidt cares deeply for education and for his students, and the biggest reward he could seek is the knowledge that his teaching had a positive impact on someone’s life.
He recalled recently one of his students from the early 1970s saw the book announcement and texted him telling him he was one of his best teachers and thanked him for what he had done.
“That’s enough to take care of me for the next couple of years,” Schmidt said. “Sometimes you don’t even realize how you are helping them. That’s the reward.”
You are never going to get rich as an educator he said, but “the richness comes from the knowledge that you have helped people in their lives and helped them to be successful in some way.”
“When you hear those things, there is nothing better, nothing better than that.”
Technology is a tool to create better-educated students
When Schmidt began his career as a teacher in Topeka during the 1972 school year, technology in the classroom as we know it was in it infancy, but Schmidt embraced new tools and valued their ability to assist teachers in their classrooms.
Early in his career, he recalled sending letters around the world in order to collect stories to share with students about life around the globe first-hand.
Embracing the internet as a tool for learning, during his last year of teaching pulled up a live stream of people climbing Mount Everest.
“That could sear into their memory the height and the magnificence of the mountain,” he said.
The embracing of technology in the classroom has gone through ups and downs, Schmidt said, but he sees the value of integrating technology to enhance student learning.
“I think for a long time it became a fad, and then we finally figured out that technology is just a tool to help us think better, to help us find information and then we still have to use our brains to analyze it.”
“I think we have gotten more sophisticated now to use it when we need it to quickly find information.”
In particular, Schmidt said the value of technology in the classroom is the ability to prompt deeper discussions about a topic rather than spending time only on information gathering but warns technology can also be a detriment if not monitored.
“We have to be careful how we use it in schools, a lot of schools ban smartphones in the classroom and there is a good reason for that,” Schmidt said. “Kids will get on there and they will be texting and not paying attention, But there is also a lot of great use of those smartphones as well. If you can regulate and get those students to use them well, it’s a great tool.”
The information available to students with access to the internet is so vast Schmidt believes teachers now need to shift their lessons to demonstrate how to filter information, rather than how to collect it.
“I think kids are smarter than they ever were today because they are exposed to so much information, the key now is we have to teach them how to use that information, and what to do with it,” he said.
Good facilities facilitate good education
A significant part of the job of school administration is maintaining facilities, and with 20 years of administration experience, Schmidt has seen a wide range of buildings in various states of need, dedicating a chapter of the book to facilities and bond issues.
“It’s not the major thing and it’s not the only thing, but it is an important part of it,” Schmidt said. “Kids have to be comfortable, they need to take pride in their facilities. You lose something if you are teaching in an old dump.
“You still have to have the basic things in your facilities, and you have got to be modern and you have got to prepare kids for the world they will be coming into and if you are in building that you haven’t done anything to in 100 years you’re not going to be able to do that. Technology is one of the big things, technology is something that was not considered in very old buildings, and they need to be upgraded.”
Preparing for the bond issues, Schmidt said he learned a lot of valuable lessons, not just about facilities, but also about leadership.
“I did some things wrong on the first one,” he said. “The second one, I hold up as an example of the best democracy in action I have ever seen.”
During his second bond issue, it was presented three times, all three for around $20 million.
All three failed.
On the fourth one, a community group was brought together, and they came up with a 45 million bond issue.
“I was stunned,” Schmidt said. “‘I said ‘What the hell makes you think we can pass 45? We can’t even pass 19.’ ”
But the community push, succeeded with 58 percent voting yes.
“It was an amazing process,” Schmidt said.
He shared those lessons with Leadership Kansas on how to build a consensus.
Generally, Schmidt hopes people stop to learn about the facilities in the districts and they come to understand their importance.
“We had the people that said ‘It was good enough for me back then, it’s good enough for them today.’ Well, that’s short sighted,” he said.
He recalled during his bond issues others told him it’s not the building that makes the education, teachers do.
“All of those have some element of truth in them, but they are not the whole story,” he said.
Finding educators harder during far-right leadership in Kansas
Schmidt is not shy sharing his political opinions and unsuccessfully ran as a Democrat for the Kansas Senate in 2016.
He believes many of the difficulties finding high-quality teachers in Kansas lays squarely on the shoulders of Republican leadership in Kansas that frequently attacked education in the state.
Schmidt said it is getting harder and harder to find teachers.
“When Sam Brownback came in and the far right leadership of the legislature, they started attacking education, they started with attacking administrators, saying we get paid too much, and we don’t do enough and there is too many of us, then they even started attacking teachers.”
He said the trend has continued causing many to abandon their hopes of becoming teachers knowing they will get attacked and paid at a lower level than similarly educated professionals.
“That’s reflected right now in our low numbers in lower numbers in our schools of education,” Schmidt said.
But he believes the current Kansas governor is pro-education and has hopes the trend may start to reverse, but without higher pay, it will still be challenging to find teachers.
“We have got to raise that pay,” Schmidt said. “I think what we have got to do is continue to try and explain to people why it is important and why we need to fund it.”
Unlike many other professions, no matter what technology comes along Schmidt said the problem is education is a people-intensive business and leaders must recognize the value of good teachers in Kansas schools.
“We have got to have political leaders who talk about the value of education and recognize the outstanding teachers that are out there,” Schmidt said.
And he knows both sides of the pay issue — as a superintendent he often had to negotiate pay with teachers to make a budget, noting the teachers were not always happy, but he always did what he could.
“The bottom line is that it pays off if we have an educated population we do better as a state, everybody does better,” Schmidt said.
Kansas, he said, has always been a leader in education until that last decade, corresponding with the attacks on education, and that was an attraction for people to come to Kansas.
“All of that has come together and pulled us done where we are not in the top 10 anymore.”