When Bill Bucklin arrived at Brown in the fall of 1967, he was a student from the suburbs of Madison, Wisconsin, without a clear sense of where he was headed. By the time he graduated in 1971, he had found his calling through the Education Department's coursework and student teaching, as well as experiences in and around Brown that reoriented how he understood teaching and the nature of a fulfilling career. He went on to spend 40 years in public school classrooms, followed by 7 years in independent school classrooms. 

Brown's Volunteer Programs 

Bucklin describes his freshman year as “aimless.” The pivot came in his sophomore year, when he signed up to volunteer with Brown Youth Guidance, a campus social services organization. He was matched with a member of Brown's housekeeping staff named Mrs. Jeannette Perry, who had grown up in rural Mississippi and had long dreamed of becoming a doctor. She was preparing for the GED.

"I will never forget the patiently forgiving look Mrs. Perry gave me when I ingenuously asked her what had kept her from her dream of becoming a doctor," Bucklin says. "In that moment I realized how sheltered I had been from economic reality. That was the moment I realized I wanted to become a teacher."

The experience connected to something deeper in Bucklin's relationship with Brown. His grandfather, Harold Bucklin, had graduated from Brown in 1910, earned his PhD in sociology from Brown in 1918, and served as a Brown professor until 1951. During his own undergraduate years, Harold had been principal of the Evening Grammar School in Pawtucket. "I probably shouldn't have been surprised that the Education Department so quickly became a haven for me," Bucklin reflects, "because even though I had grown up in Wisconsin, I had Rhode Island education DNA in me from my grandfather Harold Bucklin." When Harold died at the end of Bucklin's first month at Brown, Bucklin says he "very much felt his spirit guiding me as I began my teacher training at Brown. I still get chills thinking about it."

The Education Department Courses

Bucklin began the Education Department courses his junior year and describes landing in territory that quickly felt like home. He found the philosophy of education course especially compelling, centered on the work of John Dewey. One statement from Dewey has stayed with him ever since: "If we teach today's students as we taught yesterday's, we rob them of tomorrow."

The methods course left a more complicated impression. "I remember the ‘methods of education’ course as disappointingly 'old school' while I was very much 'new school,'" he says. He credits it with teaching him something essential: "I learned to do the lesson plan dance I would spend my entire teaching career doing, choreographing learning objectives while knowing that the 'dance' of the actual classes would involve something far more complicated than the lesson plans could encompass."

His student teaching placement at Hope High School in Providence rounded out the experience. By the time he graduated, he had been offered a teaching position there. 

An Unexpected Detour

A low draft number meant Bucklin couldn't accept the Hope High position. He enlisted in the Army instead. The decision turned out to be among the most formative experiences of his life.

On his first overnight camp-out in basic training, he shared a tent with a young man from Pennsylvania named Jim Brink, who had been pulled out of school to help on his family's farm. Unable to sleep in the heat, Bucklin talked for hours about his favorite books and authors. Finally he paused. After a long silence, Jim asked: "What's in books?"

"Jim's question made me realize that books were not part of everyone's DNA, which I had grown up assuming was the case, certainly so at Brown," Bucklin says. "I knew at Brown that I wanted to be a teacher, but I didn't know until Fort Dix what kind of teacher I wanted to be." The realization that shaped the rest of his career was that he “ would travel to my students intellectually rather than expecting them to travel to me."

A week later, an Army mail clerk dropped off his Brown diploma. "But my real 'graduation,'" Bucklin says, "was Jim Brink's question."

Embracing Change

Fifteen years into his career, declining school enrollment eliminated Bucklin's high school English position. He took a job teaching eighth-grade English and stayed for twenty-five years. "I soon found out I was born to be an 8th grade teacher," he says.

That pattern is central to what Bucklin wants students today to understand. "A teaching career, any career, anything in life, will be full of unforeseen events," he says. "Those events must be embraced."

He also stresses the importance of evolving. "As my teaching career progressed, I learned how much that applied to me. As the years passed, a technique that had worked like a charm would stop working. A strategy that one year I saw as key would seem shallow the following year." The only way to stay energized, he says, is to keep learning.

For Brown students considering the education track today, Bucklin advises "If one ends up doing something completely different than what one thought one would be doing right after college, it doesn't mean you're a failure. It doesn't mean anything — period."

Ultimately, in the same spirit his grandfather modeled, and that Brown Youth Guidance first sparked in him, Bucklin believes, "There has never been a more blessed time to become a teacher."