With romantic visions of the life of an academic historian, Ryan Carey embarked on the journey he thought would lead him there. But reality was harder to replicate than the models in his mind's eye and he moved away from the academy. When a friend suggested he try teaching at a private high school, he resisted, blind to all the ways it was a perfect match. Find out how sometimes taking a leap and going beyond the expected can bring you back to where you belong.
With romantic visions of the life of an academic historian, Ryan Carey embarked on the journey he thought would lead him there. But reality was harder to replicate than the models in his mind's eye. After landing an initial position in a claustrophobic environment and putting more energy into his classroom teaching than publishing, his bid for tenure was unsuccessful and he moved away from the academy. He found a public history position in the museum world but found himself missing teaching. When a friend suggested he try teaching at a private high school, he resisted, blind to all the ways it was a perfect match.
In this episode, find out from Ryan how sometimes taking a leap and going beyond the expected can bring you back to where you belong.
About This Episode’s Guest
Ryan Carey currently serves as Director of Experiential Education and Extension Programs at St. Margaret's Episcopal School in San Juan Capistrano, California. He holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Texas at Austin, where he specialized in environmental history and the history of the American West, and is happy to be living, surfing, and soaking up the vistas back on that coast.
Ryan Carey: I was like, you guys we're gonna be historians. So we were reading critical cultural theory, continental philosophers, and like guess what? When you throw that shit at a smart 16-year-old and if you create a culture in a classroom that affords the opportunity to have trust and being like, I don't know what this means, but I'm kind of interested to find out like they get it.
Leslie Jennings Rowley: Today, I'm here with Ryan Carey and we are going to talk about how the peripatetic life leads you to places that seem familiar, and yet you kind of are trying to blow them up. I don't know. I just have this feeling it's gonna feel very rebel-like. So Ryan, so happy to have you with us.
RC: Thanks so much, Leslie. I really appreciate it and I'm very much looking forward to this conversation.
LJR: Great. So when I have a guest on for the first time, I ask them two questions and they are these, when we were in college, who were you? And when we were getting ready to leave, who did you think you would become? Easy one.
RC: When I was in college, who was I? Terrified, I think, Cowardly probably. I think I had a decent sense of myself. You know, I was a history major. I loved history. It was really, really fun. I also, I think. Was attracted to our professors and their lives and the impacts that they had on us as students. I mean, I regularly remember, you know, one or two courses a year, you know, and, and the professors that we had. And the impact that they had on my life. Right? So freshman fall, American essays of place with Terry Osborne, right? I mean, it, it literally, it set the course for me intellectually for what I've done. I mean, we read, you know, it was Thoreau and Edward Abbey and Gretel Ehrlich and all these, you know, American nature writers. Marlene Heck, my last year at Dartmouth, she was American architecture. I think I tried to get into another class. It didn't fit like, and here was this architecture class and I was like, whatever. It was incredible. It was amazing. I didn't realize how it mapped onto what I, you know, was interested in, largely in the world until later. But when I, when I went to grad school, she got me a job at a historic preservation firm that she had started in Austin. You know, I think about Half Zantop, I mean, you know, (LJR: mm-mm) The tragedy that that was. But God-damnit, he was a great professor. You know, I was like, environmental stuff, environmental imagination. I was like, oh, I'm gonna take a geology class. And I took this, I enrolled in this geology class and it, there was like a hundred people in it and…
LJR: I was one of them.
RC: Well, another class opened up and I was like, I want this other class more. And then the next quarter I enrolled in geology again, and I was too dumb to recognize that it had a lab attached to it and most people didn't want to spend the extra time in like the lab. I didn't quite understand what was going on, so I went from a class. Of a hundred to one of 12 because of the lab and the lab. The lab was US traipsing around New Hampshire and Vermont woods with Brenton encompasses and rock hammers, you know, and magnifying glasses. And that was our lab. Right? And it was a class of 12 and there were two labs. So it was, it was Half and six of us on Tuesday and Half and six of us on Thursday. Right? Like so, okay. I say like all of that is to say you had these professors who like really cared and I was, I think I was really attracted to that idea and I loved history. I really got, I got totally seduced by research and the archives and so.
And I was interested in the world around me. I liked the life of the mind. You know, the, I loved that aspect of Dartmouth. The people that I gravitated toward were people who wanted to talk and think and question and wonder. And so I, you know, I had a sense of myself as that, right? I think that's who I was.
I said, I, you know, I say like terrified and cowardly because like I had no idea where that would lead me to. And I really was unsure of if I could actually live that life. And then your second question was, who did I think I would become,
LJR: You would become. Mm-hmm.
RC: I thought I'd become a historian. You know, I like, I left whatever X num X percentage of our graduating class did corporate recruiting. Right. You know, I didn't. Again, that, I think that was part, partly the cowardly terrified part. I was like, oh, I'm just gonna be a historian. This is gonna be the way it's gonna work. So I went to grad school. Leslie, I applied to 12 graduate schools. I got into one. Like I got rejected from everywhere and I got into UT and it was because of the project that I wanted to do was a project that this kind of old curmudgeonly lion of the field thought was mildly interesting. And so I got into UT the, we got in and I remember the very first kind of meeting that we had with our coordinator was like. No one got in this year. You guys are super lucky. And I'm looking around and I'm like, what the fuck? I didn't get into anywhere. And then now they're, you're saying that I got into here when it was difficult. I like just totally confusing. Right.
But I thought I was gonna be a historian. I was, you know, I was gonna do the PhD. I was gonna become a professor and that was gonna be it. Super straight line. That's just what it's gonna be. And I was like the youngest person in my graduate cohort. Everybody else had at least two or three years, you know, and a good number of people had five or eight years out of school. You know, I was the only one that like took a beeline for it. So I thought it was gonna be historian.
LJR: But in your mind, historian was not book writing. Oh, dusty old in the library archives. It was paired with this professorial Mindset.
RC: Yeah. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I did, I was, again, too dumb to understand the one that there was a broad range of what the historical profession looked like. I didn't really understand what a research university was when I left. My blinders about college was like, it was like all colleges were like Dartmouth, and some were bigger and those were worse. You know, like that's all that I had a sense of, you know, like Jerry Daniel was the first history teacher I had. He was fantastic. Loved him, you know, and like, I just was like, oh yeah, like that's a great.
LJR: I wanna be that.
RC: I wanna be that. He's hilarious. This seems fun, you know, like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it was, I mean, it was, so I would tweed patches and certainly dusty archives and all that kind of stuff, but didn't, I didn't quite understand like all that it entailed.
LJR: Okay. So when were the scales lifted? What did you, what happened?
RC: I struggled mightily my first year in graduate school. It was ch, I mean, it was challenging. Real. I was a hard, hard worker. But I didn't work smart at all. Everybody else knew how to read. I didn't know how to read. You know? I was like a book a week in three classes, plus, you know, the papers or whatever. Oh my God. I was like, okay, well, you know, classes on Monday, it's Tuesday. The book is X number of pages long divided by seven. And read. I survived because I caught on quick in discussions. I was engaged and as everybody know, who knows me, knows happy to hear myself talk in seminars, you know? And I think, I think the professor saw something in me, but like I was better than mediocre. But like I wasn't very smart about how to do that. It took me a year or so to really get it, to learn how to read a book like you do as a professional historian, as an academic, you know, that mercenary way of like, get in, get out, you know, you can read it in a morning and understand where it fits. That took me a while.
The writing and the research came a little bit easier to me. It wasn't good at it, but like it wasn't as painful, I'd say within a couple years. I was like, oh, this is the deal. I was super lucky, by the way, the cohort that I came in with, my graduate school. Amazing, incredible people, right? I think my closest friends in the world are probably still them.
I have like three or four different kind of like generations of friends, you know, like close knit families that I help to create. And one of them is this graduate student cohort and only a couple of them are still in the academy, but they were great. Really kind, generous, sympathetic, incredibly smart, and that was a, it was a very warm and supportive environment that, by the way, is also super unique. As you know, most graduate schools are backbiting and cutthroat and dog eat dog. The University of Texas, when I went there was somehow strange. It was just, it was glorious. We all looked out for each other. Conferences or fellowships or scholarships or whatever would come down the pike. If it didn't fit you, you would tell somebody else. It was, I mean, it was like a magical, magical place and it afforded me the opportunity to slowly. Come to understand what this project, this larger intellectual project was. So I had the eagerness, I had the engagement, I had the drive and desire, but I just didn't know how to do it. So, but within a couple years I was like, oh, okay. I get it, you know? And then I take my major field exams and that's that kind of like, you know, you stop taking classes. You read for a year, right? I think I had a, a book list of about 500. I'm like, okay, I have 365 days to do this. Spun my wheels for a couple weeks trying to figure it out, but then just like got down to a rhythm and it was a, it was one of the best years of my life. I would sit down in the morning, make coffee or tea, sit on my chair, grab my book, read for a couple hours. Have lunch, mull it over in the afternoon, I would write three to 500 words about what I had read, and that book was done right? And so, and it, and it would just, it would just bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. It was phenomenal, you know? And some days I read two or some days I didn't read it. I it. It became a lifestyle and a rhythm. It was so great. You know, I had to go to class 'cause I was TAing or whatnot every now and again and some weekends I would grade a hundred papers or that kind of stuff. But it was awesome.
I mean, that was one of my favorite experiences and I loved that. Right. Loved it, loved it, loved it. And then after my major field exams, my dissertation proposal.
So I was interested in how Americans understood and perceived the West. So I got to UT because there was this guy named Bill Getman, who was famously an asshole. By the time that I got to. UT and I, an asshole at UT and an asshole like within the academy writ large. He won the Pulitzer in like his first book when he was 20, whatever. And then I think just was pissed off ever since then that he, that he, no one gave him his due. But he was incredibly smart and, and like a crazy thinker. He wrote a book and did a PBS series in the eighties called the West of the Imagination, and I was like, oh, this is interesting. When I was at Dartmouth I literally remember Ed Chin saying, you're from Oregon. Do they have electricity there? And it was like tongue in cheek. He might deny that he ever said that, but I remember it very, very, like, very clearly, you know?
And I just, I was like, oh, right. I'm a westerner and I didn't quite understand that. I was born in the Bay Area. We lived on the Oregon coast in a small timber town for a few years. I grew up, I moved to San Angelo, Texas. We moved back to the Oregon coast. I went to Portland suburbs for, you know, high school. Like, like I bounced around all these western places, but I didn't quite have a, have a, a sense of that. But when I got back to Dartmouth, it was like, oh, I am a westerner. What the fuck does that mean? And so that was what I did my undergrad honors thesis on this like explorer who went to the West and wrote about it for Eastern audiences. And then I, that's what I was gonna go to UT for. I was like, oh, I want to, I want to know how people understood this place called Oregon, because Oregon became kind of like my adoptive home where I felt like I was from more than any place else. And so, you know, my graduate advisor like, oh yeah, this is something that I know. This is something I do like. Like there's still room for people to do stuff here. Great.
LJR: Wait, your graduate advisor was the asshole?
RC: Totally. Yeah. Nice. Nice. To his like, like, like he would fight tooth and nail for his students. (LJR: Ah) If you didn't pray in public to him, I think he hated you. I mean, his students were got, got kind of a pass on that and I think maybe we learned quickly we were supposed to do that. He also said, you should pray in public in general to whomever, right? Like, you know, your footnotes and your literature reviews and your kind of historiography is all about, you know, standing on the shoulders of giants. And he was a, he was a total giant, like his name was William Getman. He wrote Exploration and Empire Pulitzer in like 64 something, 62 or 64. He wrote three more books on exploration and then a ton of stuff on just like the imagination of the the American West in various capacities and other things. But part of my kind of like coming into consciousness of what like a professional historian was, was realizing, I can't write his book again about Oregon. It's like boring. And so I happened to take a class in the geography department, didn't take a geography class at Dartmouth. What a total missed opportunity there. There were only a handful of geography departments in the United States, but I took a class in geography department, cultural geography. That was again, kind of one of these like environmental imagination classes. Guy named Robin Dowdy, British guy, loved it. And from there I got super interested in maps, like what maps are and what they mean and how they represent and represent a landscape and a people, territories, population, resources. And so, you know, through that I was like, okay, this is what my. Dissertation project is gonna be, it's gonna be about maps and I, and I found my way into labor history and Native American history and environmental history of the late 19th century from another professor there at UT, guy named Gunther Peck. So I created this dissertation project. It was like, okay, how do corporations and the state cooperate in this larger combined imperialist effort of colonizing the American West and what role did maps play and what role did cardiographic and a geographic vocabulary play, you know, in this larger project? And then how did, like mental territories and imaginations of places, how did those become points of conflict? As well as cooperation, you know, for folks on the ground: Laborers homesteaders the indigenous population. So it like that was my projects swirled around maps and how people use them, abuse them, their utilitarian value and their kind of ideological content. So that was my shtick. Right. I did that and it was super fun. I went everywhere. I went to Boston. I had all these research fellowships, which is what you do. You know, I was like bouncing around the archives for a couple years for that. Wrote the dissertation. That was super fun. So, so I loved, loved, loved the academic life when I was living it there at UT, but,
LJR: But…
RC: And then I, and, and then I won the lottery, right? Yeah. Like, as, as you know, humanities, PhDs were a dime a dozen. I mean, and everyone and their mother has a PhD in US History. The year I got my degree, I guess, what was it? Oh three. There were 2000 PhDs in history minted. There were 1200 of those 2000 were in US history.
LJR: Mm.
RC: There were 285 tenure track positions in history as a whole that year. Right. How many of those were Americanists? I don't even know. I mean, it was just like, there, there had been a glut of PhDs in history forever. Went on the market, didn't get it. UT was like, they had a few spots for folks that they were confident something would land for. And so like the next year I, I was a visiting assistant professor at UT, whatever. It's basically just a, like a gimme to the graduate students that, that they were hoping to kind of support for the next X number of years. And so the next year I applied to whatever, 150 different things, postdocs, teaching positions, et cetera. Landed a job. Super lucky, right? And people way better than me with a way better pedigree and, you know, and far better work were not getting jobs. It's just a lottery. And so I landed at this weird liberal arts experiment in western Massachusetts called Simon's Rock. It was the nation's only four year residential liberal arts early college. So the joke was students would drop out of high school to go to college. Right. They'd come you know, after their sophomore year, sometimes after their freshman year if they were really precocious. Ronan Farrow was a Simon's Rock attendee. You know, like, it's like you had some interesting folks who did it. Tiny little liberal. There were 400 kids total. You know, most of our kids would transfer after two years. We had really good relationships with really great schools. I mean, we basically minted little graduate students. They were like ready to go, you know? A handful would stay on for the four year degree. Everyone would graduate usually, you know, at 20 or so with a BA from wherever they chose. It was crazy. A wonderful place to teach. Like the classrooms were amazing. But it was a stifling place to be. It's in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Few years after 9-11, a bunch of people were taking early retirement. I felt like I was like one of the youngest people there. The faculty was great, but you know, I will say this: Academics can be weird. My vision of academia from the University of Texas was again, I mean, my life I feel like is just a series of wake up calls where like, I have these incredible experiences and then it turns out…
LJR: You didn't, they know what you're getting into.
RC: They're totally unique and they're, you know, you can't replicate them anywhere else. And it was just like. The luck of the fucking draw, right? I really liked teaching. It turned like I was, I kind of gravitated toward that. But my colleagues, they weren't friends. They weren't real friends, you know? I mean, I was friendly with them. I made some friends, but like, I was like, Jesus, this is not what I expected. And so I was pretty unhappy, you know, in my life. I was super happy in the classroom. I was pretty unhappy in my life. Turns out I'm not someone who is a publisher. You know, I have a lot to say, but man, I hate revision. It's terrifying for me. Like I can write, but revising is hard. And getting those rejections or even those revise-and-resubmits like, it just was like, it wasn't my thing. You know? I feel like my creativity, it turns out, was in my teaching. I had great fun teaching there. I taught a history of cartography. I taught a, a history of animals called Animal House, cultural and social history of animals.
LJR: Nice.
RC: I taught a class called The Great Outdoors, a cultural and social history of outdoor recreation. We made maple syrup, right? We went rock climbing. We went hiking and snowshoeing. My classes were super fun and the conversations I had with kids were amazing. I taught a history of slavery. I took kids to Ghana with a African American literature professor, like it was. We did some incredible stuff and I, that's where I was pouring my energy into and I didn't get tenure. There are lots of reasons why that didn't happen. I think the main reasons I wasn't publishing. I didn't get tenure. I got divorced, like, and I'm sitting here in Great Barrington in a big house alone, and I'm like, what am I doing? You know? And like I didn't, I didn't wanna be there, you know?
LJR: Mm-hmm.
RC: The one friend that I had. But the one real close friend that I had, he was an adjunct professor. He got, he got laid off as they were laying off a bunch of adjuncts. Funny thing, he comes back 10 years later and he, and he was running the place and he was like, he was like, Ryan, get out of Great Barrington. You gotta leave Simons Rock. And I was like, I'm terrified. I can't, what are you talking about? And then Simons Rock told me that he was right. I had to leave Simons Rock. So I, you know, I didn't get tenure and I was like, what the hell am I gonna do now? So I had made some friends, none of whom were in the Berkshires, all of whom were in New York City. And so I left and I was like, what am I gonna do? And they were like, come to New York, we'll find you a job. I'm like, okay. So by the grace of God. Two people that I had spent two kind of like fun weekends with at this like artist's musician, writer, academic salon in Vermont. They were like, you can live on our couch. Two of the most generous human beings I've ever met, they were like, come and live on our couch. Find a place. I did for three weeks in a one bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. I still don't understand. They are still friends, which is crazy. And so, you know, I found an apartment, another friend from that same little like coterie of writers and thinkers and academics got me a foot in the door at the Museum of the City of New York. I became the museum's director of public programs and a special curatorial consultant. That was my title, I think.
LJR: Which aligned really well with the kind of energies that you were expending in the classroom. Some experiential stuff, visual stuff, interdisciplinary…
RC: Not the experience, no. The disciplinary stuff. I, and it was, and it was cool and it was super fun and public. The public history stuff I really liked. I liked the museum world. I curated an exhibition with a woman named Liz McEnany, a kind of an environmental history of New York City. She was a gsap, a Columbia Graduate School of Architecture and Preservation person. And, and so we, we thought about space and place and, you know, and the environment and people's interaction with it. And, and we, we had a super fun time doing that was awesome. And I did that for like a couple of years, but like I found that I really missed teaching, you know. The public programs was super fun. I'd bring people together and we'd have these like, like cool, you know, book talks and panel discussions and like those kinds of things. But I really, I really missed teaching.
And I was looking, I was kind of casting around for something to do and one of my friends from graduate school who had left ut, he was like, I'm not gonna get a PhD. This is crazy. He's like, I'm gonna go. I'm gonna be a teacher. And so he went and he became a private school teacher out out here in California. And I was talking to him. He was like, Ryan, you should try private school teaching. And I was an arrogant prick and I was like, I didn't get a PhD to teach fucking high school, you know? And he was like, ‘You are an idiot. Like you, like you're a dumb ass. Like you have no idea what you're talking about. You would love it.’ And I resisted, resisted, resisted, but I was, at that point I had left the museum and I was actually kind of like looking for a job. And the person I was dating at the time, who I'm now married to, was like ‘You are an idiot. Like you're gonna do this, or like…’
LJR: It might be off,
RC: Or, yeah. Or you might have another chapter in your life. And so, and then this job opened up 12 blocks from where I was living in Brooklyn. I had been in Brooklyn for a couple, three years at that point, maybe two years. A job opened up 12 blocks in Brooklyn. I put in an application. It was in May. They were behind the eight ball. If I'm applying for that job in December when they had first opened it up, I'm not getting it. I didn't have enough like high school teaching experience. I like sold them on the fact that I had taught high school aged kids, which was true. It was, it wasn't a con. And I got the job and holy shit, am I lucky? It was…what an education. So incredible. All of a sudden I was back in the thing that I, it was where I had wanted to be since graduate school and it all lined up. I had incredible colleagues. Incredible colleagues who are now some of my greatest, greatest friends, creative thinkers, incredibly smart people, all of whom like me, had come into teaching, you know, in private school, not because we were like at 20 decided we want to be teachers, but like we'd all had a version of a life beforehand. I recognized this place immediately. And we had great curricular freedom. Like, like tons of fun stuff. So b, the students, I mean, it was a well-heeled private school in New York City, you know, like these are the students that most humanities PhDs don't ever get to teach because they end up in places that they didn't think that they wanted to teach in the first place and never really kind of like figured out how to, how to square that circle, you know? So these were really smart kids. They were really energized, they were really engaged, they were really driven, and they were teachable. I mean, I was doing stuff in my classes that would have put my first year graduate student self to shame. Right. Like, because I was, and, and so in my head the entire time I'm like, what, what took me a year and a half to learn in graduate school? What didn't I learn at Dartmouth? Like, what is history? And I was like, I was like, you guys, I'm just training you to be historians. Like that's what we're doing here. Like I don't, like, this isn't about APS and tests and bubbles, and this isn't about textbooks. Like we're gonna be historians. So we were reading like. Critical cultural theory, continental philosophers, you know, like, I mean just in the like incredible stuff. And like guess what? When you throw that shit at a smart. 15, 16-year-old, if you help them struggle with it. And if you create a culture in a classroom that that affords the opportunity to, to like have that kind of vulnerability to laugh at yourself and others, you know, to, to have trust and being like, I don't know what this means, but I'm kind of interested to find out like they get it. They get it. You know, I had students that were writing research papers in 10th grade that were better than my, you know, junior year research papers at Dartmouth. Maybe that says more about me than it does about them. But like it was the Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn, New York is a magical place.
LJR: Right. And it's not in Great Barrington in the middle,
RC: And it's not in Great Barrington. No.
LJR: So you had a life outside that as well.
RC: Yeah, I like to say I went to New York to tick off a couple boxes, right? To like find myself in terms of my career, to perhaps find someone else that I wanted to spend my life with. And if that happened to start a family and like check, check, check, like, you know, New York was great for me in that, in that sense.
LJR: And how long were you there?
RC: Almost 15 years.
LJR: Whoa. And still at the same school.
RC: I was at Packer for 12. I was in New York for 15.
LJR: Wow. Yeah. Wow. Right after the museum.
RC: Yeah. New York was great, but New York is a, you know, Levon Helm in The Last Waltz says ‘New York is an adult dose,’ it's an adult portion, you know? It'll kick your ass. And like you, you, you get up the next morning and, and you go out and you do it again and you learn to love it. And I did, but I was done, you know?
LJR: Yeah, yeah. Well, luckily a siren song came singing from the West. Coast to bring you back West.
RC: Leslie. I had been, I think ever since Ed Chin joked that they don't have electricity in Oregon I had been wanting to get back to the West. Since we graduated in 1996, and I never could on any kind of permanent basis, you know, like Austin, Texas was as close as I got, and it's its own thing.Texas is its own country. Texas is a fantastic place. It's just not the west, you know, it's just its own place. Yeah. So I've been trying to get back to West ever, ever since. When my wife and I were like, okay, what are we gonna do? We gotta get outta New York City. I did not wanna go where you were. I was like, fuck New Jersey? Like, fuck…
LJR: That's what everyone says.
RC: Fuck Connecticut. Fuck Westchester. Like, no, no, no. I was just like, I don't wanna go there. That's not, you know, like that's not what it is. But for my 40th birthday, Beth got me, my wife got me surf surfing lessons. I'd kind of threatened to do so in New York. I grew up on the Oregon coast in the eighties. People surf there, but those people were nuts. Right? It's like you're, you're dodging like sharks and like, you know,
LJR: Big boulders
RC: Douglas fir trees and so, and, but New York, you don't go to surf in New York. But I joke, you know, New York is a coastal community and so she got me surf lessons has rued the day ever since I took to it like a duck to water. I love it. I'm terrible to call what I do, surfing as an insult to surfers, but I totally love it. One of the things I got to do at Packer, we had this experiential education program that got created kind of out of whole cloth, little intercession in the middle of January. And when we had our son, I, I first, I took kids up to the Adirondacks. So we had snowshoeing and we read environmental history and we thought about what it. What it meant for the state to surveil and map and police our national parks or you know, these spaces and call them parks and like the gendered and racial and you know, class, you know, overtones and undertones of all that. It was super fun. Loved that. We would snowshoe in five degree weather. But then we had our son and Beth was like, you're not going back to the Adirondacks in January. And so I was like, okay, what am I gonna do? And I was like, you know what? Let's, let's make surfboards. I've never done this before. I've, I'm, I've been surfing for two and a half years. This will be a lark. And so I found a partner in crime and at Packer, and I took 18 kids. We rented a warehouse in Red Hook, Brooklyn. You know, 20 people walked into the warehouse and two weeks later every kid walked out and me and my friend walked out with a surfboard that we had made ourselves incredible, super. And we learned about oceanography and bathymetry and gentrification and entrepreneurship and you know, like. Post industrialization and the urban crisis in, in Rockaway Beach, New York. It was awesome.
LJR: And geometry and woodworking and,
RC: And physics and wave physics and yeah, it like all, like all manner of stuff. It was super fun and I was like, oh, I guess I'm a experiential educator. Like I guess that's what I am.
LJR: Yeah. And probably have been just Without the label. Right?
RC:Yeah. I had no idea. You know, I mean, that's what we were doing when we were making maple syrup. You know, in the Great Barrington Woods. That's what we were doing when we were visiting slave castles on the Ghanaian coast. That's what I was doing when I was taking kids, you know when, when my history of slavery class at Packer was making a museum exhibition, you know, on the history and memory of slavery. You know, that I, I didn't, I hadn't, I haven't given a test in my entire teaching career. It's always been like you're writing something or you're making something. So anyway, so I, you know, we were like, we want to get out of Brooklyn. I end ended up being in charge of our little intercession, our experiential education intercession program at Packer.
And God, this is all about my career. It's really weird. I don't know if that's. I've, I've actually always seen who I am and what I do as very closely aligned. You know, people talk about vocation and I do kind of think I, I didn't realize this until I, I started teaching at Packer, but like, my vocation is teaching is education. I hate that word educator. Like, it just seems like people trying to like class up what is a much more interesting vocation, which is teacher, you know, like, like I'm a teacher. Like the, the professors I had at Dartmouth were teachers. People that I gravitate to are teachers who want to help other people think hard thoughts about the world. So I what I ended up running our little experiential education program at Packer. I shifted a little bit and I began helping teachers teach. Then I was like, well, we gotta leave New York. What I could get another like history teacher job, but I'm kind of like, like I want to go to a place that's gonna afford me the opportunity to do the kinds of stuff and to help other people do the kinds of stuff that I think is good teaching. And that's when St. Margaret's opened up. You know, I was, I was looking at places like that and jobs like this and I, you know, once again, just lucked out.
LJR: Yeah.
RC:Landed here and, and we are building a program like this. They, we didn't have it, like, it wasn't the connection with Janine that brought me to St. Margaret's. It was actually one of my former partners in crime at Packer, who ended up being the, the high school principal here. She was like, Ryan, we need an experiential educator. And I was like, great. And then she's like, we're hiring this person. You need to get your application in tomorrow. And I'm like, great, I will do that. And then when I get the interview, she's like our head of school went to Dartmouth kind of around the same time. And I went and I looked and it was like Janine Graham, and I'm like. That's not Jeneen Graham. That's Jeneen DiBenedetto.
LJR: That's Jeneen DiBenedetto. That's right.
RC: Like who, you know, looks exactly the same, of course.
LJR: And so it wasn't that Jeneen had found you, it's that this job found you because it was the universe and your destiny and all of those things saying, okay, finally I do know what my vocation is, my calling, and yeah, here's this opportunity. And so you've really been able to shape that program at St. Margaret's. I see two gigantic surfboards behind you. (RC: Yeah.) So that part has been brought with you. What else have you been able to kind of dive into, whether it's because you're back in the west or just because you've grown into who you were always supposed to be?
RC: Yeah. That's a great, I love that. Thank you. So I think, you know, one is having a, a much clearer understanding finally after 25 or 30 years of being a teacher, of what I think good teaching is and what that means is like asking students to do the work or that, my joke is like the first rule of teaching is make the students do the work. But really it's ask, you know, it's asking students to do whatever work that is. One of my good colleagues at Simons Rock was this, this old ex civil rights activist, one of the, one of the first white. Officers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Commission and the Congress of Racial Equality, you, he would, I sat in on one of his classes and I, and he said to the kids there was, we were all seminar classes. He was like, he was like, I'm not the intellectual center of this class. He's like, I know more than you, but, but like, I'm not, I'm not the arbiter here. You know? And I think that's a truism that I walk with every day, you know? And I want. My kid to be in a class where the teacher is there, as, you know, facilitating and, and kind of guiding him in terms of guardrails, but not like leading or dragging or pushing him along a straight line. I don't like straight lines.
LJR: Yeah.
RC: You know, I think my path is like suggestive of that and so, you know, we're creating this cool program here. It's called the Saint Margaret's Exploration Academy, or we call it SEA Term. It's, you know, like, these are these place-based interdisciplinary kind of real world classes where kids like chew on a series of difficult questions, right? Questions with no answers, right questions with multiple. And contradictory answers.
LJR: Right, right.
RC: I'm bringing that. I mean, I'm not, I'm not the only person to ever think this, you know, I like, like I have a real affinity for it. I wanna sit with kids and I want them to be, I want them to be like, why are you making me think this? Like, why are you making asking me this question? LJR: I don't like gray.
RC: Why is gray, good gray, good for like…that is exactly where I want to be. You know? So I think I'm bringing that with me and I have found like-minded folk here. I am in one of the epicenters of surf culture in mainland North America. It's fascinating. I mean, literally modern surfing started in. Dana Point, California, which is the town that, that is a half a mile that way. Like I love that. I, I would always joke that at Dartmouth, like we didn't have mountains, we had hills. I'm always like, where are the fucking mountains? Yeah. Like these are 3000 feet tall. That's hilarious to me. I literally get teary-eyed when I think about the fact that I can wake up in the morning and walk. 400 yards and see an 8,000 foot mountain in the near distance and a 10,000 foot mountain in the far distance. I mean, to be in the proximity of. A geography that I comprehend and feel comfortable in. I always felt the east is claustrophobic in so many ways, but it one is lit. The literal geography of it is claustrophobic. Like everything is hemmed in. You know, there are no vistas. You can't see anything.
LJR: Yeah.
RC: So I'm just. So thrilled to to be, I, like I, I wake up every morning and I just feel a sense of comfort that I was lacking for 25 years.
LJR: That's awesome. And I mean, you still have that or you've come back to that place—Maybe you never left it—but you're definitely steeped in a place right now that lets you do those things that you talked about. Really feeling like were part of your being. You said the life of the mind to talk, to think, to question and wonder. That's what you do all day and help kids learn to do or be unafraid to do, or unselfconscious to do when they're in their teens, you know, that's gonna serve them so well. And it sounds like it served you so well.
RC: I mean, I hope so. I flatter myself to think that, I mean, I'm gonna say something that's gonna sound contradictory, if not hypocritical. I hope it's paradoxical. The study of history, not the study of the past, not the study of the facts, but the study of history—the disciplinary habits of mind—have taught me a certain amount of intellectual humility. I hope I'm a humble person. Anyone who meets me would be like, what the fuck are you talking about?
RC: And like, I have strong opinions.
LJR: Intellectually humble.
RC: I am happy to express them. But the historian is always haunted, haunted by the possibility that they're entirely wrong, that they haven't asked the right question, right? Not that they just haven't uncovered the thing that happened, but that they haven't even asked the right question to even raise that possibility that our, our realm of the possible is so blinkered and so narrow complexity is what drives us. And part of that complexity is like, what have, what don't we know? What haven't we asked? What have we not thought of? Right. And like that is a profound, like, to know that you don't know.
LJR: Yeah.
RC: Right. So I, you said what I like, like, has this served me well? I, I don't know. There are. Plenty of our classmates that are far more successful than I, than I am, I mean like, like far more successful than I am by a lot of like mainstream hegemonic American metrics. Right? Right. I am happy. I am content in a lot of ways, which I didn't think I was gonna be, especially when I, when I left academia, you know. I thought I was a total fucking failure. You know, I was the per—like, I would love to write a book that's never gonna happen. Like, you know, and I, and for a long time, that dogged me. That haunted me, too. I was like, oh my God, I, you know, like I wrote this, you know, 650 page whatever dissertation. That should have been a book. I'm supposed to turn that into a book. I'm not turning into a book like what, you know, like. Horrible, but it took me a long fucking time to realize that. That's okay.
I do think that some of, some of what it is to live a life of the mind is to have a kind of an emotional purchase on yourself, not just an intellectual sense of self that affords you the opportunity to kind of like move forward in the world, to carry the burdens of the world. Not move past them, not move beyond them, but like to carry them. Like I think the history has afforded me the opportunity to carry a lot.
A few years back, a lot of people in education were talking about the distinction between social emotional learning and like the intellectual pursuits of a classroom. I understand that as a like a critique. So there was this whole push to like teach SEL, which is like, no shit. Like it seems funny to me that we had to invent a word for a, you know, a three letter acronym for it and then find a place in the schedule for it, right Start. That's, I think, yeah, I think that's the craziest part, because you know, who else understood that we needed to teach what it means to be an emotionally resonant human being? I mean, fucking Socrates, I mean, since the beginning of what we understand is the modern teacher, right? We always understood that who we were as an intellect and who we were as an emotional being are not two separate things. They're not even two sides to the same coin. They are mutually constitutive. You feel good when you learn stuff and you learn really well when you feel good, right? I mean, like there was a huge link there. That is one of the things that I maybe was part of who I was beforehand. I mean, my mom was a teacher, my grandmother was a teacher. Like education is to a certain extent, the family business. I was just too stupid to realize it. Good teachers are people who comprehend that, who know it in their bones, right? And who work to construct classrooms and classroom communities. Intellectual communities. (I take both of those terms real serious.) Like who construct classroom communities that afford the students the opportunity to engage, to explore, to delve into, to sit with the uncertainty and ambiguity of both of those things.
LJR: Right.
RC: When I was like, Hey, let's learn how to make surfboards. I had no idea what I was doing, you know, and I said that to kids. I regularly say to students, I don't know, you know, like they ask me a question about even something I'm supposed to like, like some random history stuff. I'm like, I don't know. Let's, that's a great question. Let's figure that out. Whatever that is. And that can be about the thing that we're learning from the, from whatever we're reading. Or it can be at that, like how does this thing make you feel?
LJR: And to be able to demonstrate for these kids that intellectual humility to say, I don't know. And we don't know, and we're not gonna know if we don't ask questions and no. You know, put, put a feeling out there. What is, why am I having this feeling?
RC: What is it? Right? What does it mean? How do you understand that?
LJR: Yeah.
RC: What, how does that make you feel? What do you think is the cause of that? What do you think are the consequences of that? Right. What's upstream, what's downstream? What are the ramifications? Like, sit with that. That's fine. You know, I mean, I, this, this whole jag started because you were like, oh, it served you well. And I'm like, yeah, I guess it has. I think it has. I'd like to say it has, but what I was like, the humility, it's like maybe it hasn't, you know, I don't know. You know, I, I, I am comfortable saying to people, I, I think this is one wonderful way of human being, and I use that as not the noun, but the verb, the gerund, right? The like, like ways of being a human.
LJR: Yeah. And if it got you to a place of feeling content and not claustrophobic and being willing to think, okay, I don't know what's next, but I'm gonna keep exploring and keep asking the questions, then I, I say it served you well.
RC: I mean, that's not to say I'm not terrified, like, we're launching this program here. This is the first time I've been like a proper administrator at a school, you know, like. I'm terrified all the, like, all the time. I'm like, well, I, you know, but I'm comfortable and confident enough to be like, I don't know the answer to that question, so I'm gonna go to someone who does. You know, and I, I am happy to be at a school where people don't expect perfection of you as an individual. We have high expectations. It's one of our core values here at the school at St. Margaret's. Like, high expectations is a core value, but it doesn't mean, it's kind of like we expect them to be in you already. Like how do you get there? Like if, if you don't know, you add. If you need help, you ask, right? Like if you need support, like if you wanna wonder about something you do. I go to Jeneen when I'm like, I don't know about this. Help me out on this. Like, what should I be thinking? What don't I know about this? Help me out with this. This is beyond my realm of expertise or my experience.
LJR: Well, if these are your collective values, then to enact them needs to be collective too, right?
RC: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, that's real. That's really important for me as a, as a person. And I, you know, it's like I would hate to wrap up a story of kind of like contingency and multiple possibility with a sense of, oh, I fucking made it, you know, like, like, because I have not, and like, I mean like if we had talked about my son and my, my feeling as a father and I like, oh, like. Like terror, terror, terror. You know, like, like uncertainty, uncertainty, uncertainty. You know, like, like, yeah, I, I have no idea. And am I, am I content with that? Absolutely not. Am I content as a, as a like an administrator after a year? No, by no means, you know, where is this gonna go? I have no idea. That's the other thing that history teaches you, right? The angel of history flies backwards. Right. Historians abhor prophecy, we don't do the future. You know?
LJR: Mm-hmm.
RC: Like, and that's another sense of our humility. Who the hell knows what's gonna happen tomorrow on a individual level, on the level of society. You know, like, we don't know. I don't know. I'm a, I'm a bit of a partisan when it comes to my discipline. I think we do that really well. And if I'm teaching kids anything, as a historian, I'm like, don't get complacent. Be ready for change. Be emotionally prepared for uncertainty.
LJR: Yeah. Well, that's our entire life. Uncertainty, but you've made the most of it. Ryan, thank you so much for sharing all this with us. And yeah, we'll be interested to see the experiences you get yourselves and your young charges into. So thanks.
RC: Thank you, Leslie. This has been super fun.
LJR: That was Ryan Carey, who currently serves as Director of Experiential Education and Extension Programs at St. Margaret's Episcopal School in San Juan Capistrano, California. He holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Texas at Austin, where he specialized in environmental history and the history of the American West, and is happy to be living, surfing, and soaking up the vistas back on that coast.
We are pretty content to look around at what surrounds us, too: A supportive community of listeners who not only tune in faithfully but spread the word about our show. If you want to join them, please tell people to find us wherever they get their podcasts and at RoadsTakenShow.com to find all our episodes with our guests and me, Leslie Jennings Rowley, on Roads Taken.