So You Want to Be a Teacher!: Trading a Business Career for the Joys of Teaching!

By Harlan Hansen

This book is a memoir of a young man making a major occupational change after first embarking on a business career after college and army service. Flashbacks to his early family life, academic struggles at school, the stint in the army, an unsuccessful marriage, dissatisfaction with the business culture, and dealing with limited financial resources are challenges that had to be met. But a single encounter with a graduate school faculty member opened the door to a field for which he eventually realizes he is most suitedearly childhood teacher education. Along the way, another angel joins in the adventure to foster personal success and promote creative ways of dealing with educational issues, bringing new life into the classroom.

He received two outstanding teaching awards at the University of Minnesota College of Education and Human Development. He also received the National Horace T. Morse-Amoco Outstanding Teaching Award, as well as the Governor of Minnesotas Outstanding Service Award. He served as president of the National Association of Early Childhood Teacher Educators, and he originated the Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Educators.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 28, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543410334

Harlan Hansen

Harlan S. Hansen is an Emeritus Professor of Education, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. His areas of expertise were Early Childhood Education and Classroom Management and Discipline in the Elementary School. He continues in retirement sharing his ideas with college students preparing for careers in teaching, parent groups seeking insights on raising children, and schoolteachers and administrators dealing with the variety of student behaviors. Professor Hansen has written or co-written a number of books on these topics, including 16 Ways To Fix or We’ll Never Fix Public Education, Amazon, 2012; Lessons in Literacy, Promoting Preschool Success (with Ruth Hansen), St Paul, MN, Redleaf Press, 2010; Classroom Management and Discipline in the Elementary School – Helping Children Insert Reason Between Impulse and Action: (TeachersPayTeachers website) 2005; and Playway-Education for Reality (with Ruth Hansen, Dave and Madeline Davis) Winston Press (TeachersPayTeachers website) 1973.

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Copyright © 2017 by Harlan Hansen.

Library of Congress Control Number:          2017904522

ISBN:          Hardcover                    978-1-5434-1035-8

Softcover                    978-1-5434-1034-1

eBook                    978-1-5434-1033-4

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

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without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Rev. date: 04/19/2017

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CONTENTS

The Early Years

College And The Korean War

Back To The University—And A Critical Change Of Plans

The Job With A Public Utility

A Chance Meeting

I Finally Realized That The Business World Wasn’t For Me

The Plan

My Next Job—And A Steady Income!

The Finances

Going Back To School

Entering The Program—An Unexpected Glitch

Life With David C. Davis

Planning The Commute To Janesville, Wisconsin

Starting The Practical Task Of Becoming A Teacher

The Daily Problem Of Getting Back To The University

A Bizarre Twist In My Commute Back To The University

Back In The Classroom

Life Takes On A New But Unexpected Personal Meaning

Ending The School Year

Summer School And Program Completion

The Wedding

The Job Offer—And More On-The-Job Learning

The Dictionary

The Studies

Back To Our Family

Working Together

A Fortunate Move To Minneapolis

A Major Opportunity Arises

Our First Major Publication

A Natural Professional Transition – —Taking On Classroom Management And Discipline

Applying My Ideas On A National Level

Continuation Of Classroom Management After Retirement

Teaching On The Road—The Lighter Side

Winters In Florida Were No Exception

Our Life On The Ocean

Clouds On The Horizon

The Diagnosis

Hospice Care To The End Of Life

Continuing Ruth’s Legacy: Improving Student Learning

This book is dedicated to future generations of

Hansen family members who hopefully will find new experiences to add to those shared in this book:

Laura and Chris Munsell, Lily Munsell, Scott Hansen, Chris Hansen, Jack Hansen, Lauder and Peter Dauzvardis.

My name is Harlan Hansen. I am one of the most fortunate people on this earth, and I want to share that story with anyone interested about how one’s life can be changed for the better in spite of personal setbacks along the way.

I am now in my forty-eighth year as a professor of early childhood education and of classroom management and discipline in the elementary school—twenty-eight of which were spent as a faculty member at the University of Minnesota College of Education and Human Development. The remaining years were spent being an active professor emeritus. The great benefit of university work is that one can continue to be of service to the institution, to educational programs, and to parent groups and then continue to supply the world with new knowledge.

I continued to teach classroom management and discipline for nine years after retirement because the department had no other faculty member involved in that field of study. Moreover, the department needed someone well versed in an approach that helps children learn to solve problems, not just suffer recrimination.

Yet this was not the career in which I started out as a young college graduate. Nor did I find high levels of success as I explored different kinds of work. Was it luck that made some people more successful than others? Was it knowing someone? Was it walking down one path, not knowing if the other path might have been the most desirable? Or was it a little bit of everything that all came together at the right time?

I grew up in a Depression-era family like so many others in the 1930s. Our father moved his family here and there, looking for work. Finally, he started to work on a WPA project that would have given him the much-needed income until other openings were available. But after one week on the job, he quit in protest—he did not believe the government should create jobs; he believed he had to find work for himself and his family.

Of the four children, I was the youngest. Like my next brother thirteen months older, I was also born in Springfield, Illinois. The oldest brother was born in Racine, Wisconsin, four years earlier, and my sister arrived seven years earlier. To give readers a sense of the times, she attended ten different schools during her public education.

THE EARLY YEARS

In 1937 we moved to Racine, Wisconsin, after living in St. Paul, Minnesota, for four years. There, after another year or two of unemployment, my dad secured a very good job in the printing business, working for Western Printing. He was one of the few monotype operators whose job was to set type by a single letter rather than linotype. This became crucial when the war started in 1941—he set all the foreign language dictionaries for the servicemen overseas, which called for setting individual type because of the complexities of the different languages. Finally, he had a good job. We had some money coming in, but his new job also kept him working from 6:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. every day during the war. An ironic trade-off in family living!

We boys grew up doing all the jobs around the home. They included painting as needed, plumbing repairs, putting the television antenna on the roof and securing it with wire, cleaning up the wet basement caused by spring melting—any task that needed to be done! We eagerly tackled each task with the knowledge that it was us or no one. There wasn’t money to hire anyone else.

Living on a dead-end street with twenty houses on each side, we regularly worked, shoveling snow, mowing lawns, and helping others in the neighborhood. Because these were not paying jobs, they established a service attitude that has stayed with me the rest of my life. We also worked many paying jobs during the summer and after school, which provided us the extra money to expand our daily lives.

Our grandmother lived with us in Racine during her entire life. She was a wonderful woman and loved to play games, especially dominos. We all played with her off and on, but I had her all to myself for her last three years. Even while she was failing, she still wanted the competition. Too many young people never have that opportunity in today’s lifestyles!

The best of all is that we came out of all this with a happy family. My mother had been a teacher before meeting my dad, and she must have been a good one given the way she raised us. My sister went to the county’s two-year rural normal school and taught in the rural area for several years before her marriage.

My older brother went on to the University of Wisconsin to eventually receive a PhD in economics. After stints other institutions he returned to his alma mater as a permanent faculty member. My next brother received the first full Harvard scholarship given in the Midwest. With further university work, he subsequently became a professor of philosophy at Lake Forest College in Illinois.

In some respects I wished the family had been aware of the studies on ordinal position of children in the family. While I was able to participate at my level in the above activities, I was still the youngest. Everyone laughed at my antics, enjoyed my idiosyncrasies, and then left me on my own to be with my friends. In school I heard so often how smart my next older brother was that I think I did the opposite just to show them I was my own person. And so it began to work against me. The idea of becoming a teacher might have been building quietly inside me—but it didn’t come up first as my educational goals evolved. I graduated from high school as a well-liked but not the most studious person. My career goals were still in the process of developing—if I thought about them at all!

Throughout our early lives, our father drilled a lasting reminder into all three of us: Be yourself! For example, one day while still in high school, I was on the phone, talking with a friend about what we and others would wear that evening. Our father, overhearing the discussion, told me to hang up the phone. He then lectured me for fifteen minutes, telling me that I should wear what I wanted to wear and not worry about the others! I waited until he was out of the room and then called my friend to ask what we were all going to wear. Yet that constant reminder stayed with us forever, with both positive and negative results. Woe to those who asked our opinions when they only wanted reinforcement of their own!

So what was the foundation of our basic joys and success in life? First, it was the stability and support of family life even in difficult times. We, all six of us