As I made my way down  County Line Road in northwest Wisconsin, I had to be alert, and not even sip my coffee in case a deer decided to pop out of the trees growing right up to the blacktop. This commute was in stark contrast to the 8 lanes of traffic heading in and out of Chicago that I was used to.

One morning, the sun barely up, what I thought was a clump of dirt in the road turned out to be a stubborn duck, who scolded me with loud quacking as I swerved for a near miss.

In my first period class I mentioned the duck to my students and their recommendation was I should have hit it, brought it to school and taken it to the Small Animals class who would have prepared it for me to cook for  dinner. This was when I realized I had much to learn and what a remarkable opportunity this teaching experience was going to be. I had accepted a long-term substitute job at Spooner High School.  Spooner is a former railroad town, a hub of the Chicago and North Western lines, and currently has a population of about 3,000 people or roughly the size of my entire former school. The high school  in Spooner has about 300 students that travel by school bus, some up to 30 miles.

Happily, teenagers everywhere share a common love of cell phones, lattes and ripped jeans, so I felt right at home. This group of teens was more reserved than the kids I knew in Chicago. They greeted me with a polite, friendly, wariness.

I loved the chance to tweak some of my favorite projects and to develop some new curricula that was a better fit for my new students. I learned a new schedule, found the gym,  the custodian, and figured out how to reload the paper towel machine. I asked questions and learned about hunting, cutting wood and ATVing. The smaller world I found myself in made me realize how “fitting in” took on a whole new meaning.

The teen world can only really be experienced by its members, and so my observations about cliques, friends and fashions remain on the surface. Overall these kids were really cute, and had universal teen traits of making unnecessary trips to the bathroom, an obsession with their phones and a love of gym shoes. But they also had a tremendous work ethic, an understanding of the outdoors and a feeling of family.

I will consider my time as a Spooner Rail a rare chance to be teacher and a student once more.

Thank you Spooner!