Lydon Friedrich Vonnegut
Middle School English Teacher
Collegiate School, New York City

Lydon Friedrich Vonnegut teaches English to sixth- and seventh-grade boys at the Collegiate School on the Upper West Side of New York City. When she told Milton classmate Lindsay Haynes she had clinched this job, Lindsay said: “That’s great! And it’s exactly what you said you wanted to do senior year at Milton—teach middle-school English.”

Lydon was surprised. She didn’t remember her career ambitions being so explicit or clear in high school. “I was an English and political science major in college and got into stage management,” she says. “I spent lots of time dealing with people and solving problems as a stage manager, and I enjoyed it. I was good at organizing things to run smoothly.” Focused on finding a job after graduation that would involve dealing with people to solve problems, she thought to try her hand at management consulting or public relations.

She gave her best effort to a job at KeySpan, the energy delivery company in Boston, as an administrative assistant in the PR department. “I was half secretary and half low man on the corporate affairs totem pole,” Lydon says. “It was miserable. I was a particularly terrible secretary.

“At KeySpan, I kept exploring job opportunities in the nonprofit sector,” she says. “There are so many things to do; I knew that something was out there that would suit me, but I had no idea how to find it. I felt like I had no idea what people actually did or how they figured out that they wanted to do it.”

Scanning the nonprofit options, she came back again and again to educational opportunities. She remembered that she had loved teaching during her high school summers at the Kilburn Park School in London, a school for refugee children and children with special needs.

Then, the day after applications to master’s programs in education were due, she made the decision to switch to teaching.

Her then fiancé’s impending job in New York threw Lydon into a job search. That August, a second-grade teaching assistant position opened at the Trevor Day School, and it gave Lydon the opportunity and the mentor that would open the door for her to a career in education.

Plans to attend graduate school at Teachers College, Columbia University, the following year switched to the University of Michigan when Lydon’s husband started law school at the same institution. “ELMAC (the Elementary Master’s of Arts with Certification) was geared toward people who were returning from the Peace Corps, and so was a 12-month intensive master’s program. My experience was, I think, much like that of most people in teacher education programs. It was a mix of courses full of interesting and practical information and classes that were disasters, but I had some amazing professors in literacy and social studies.

“[My husband and I] loved Ann Arbor. It was such an easy place to live. The community was involved and interesting, and there were most of the arts and culture opportunities of a large city with a smaller-city feel. I really think that leaving New York is an important thing to do; it helps you gain perspective in so many ways. While you’re living there, New York has a way of becoming the center of your universe, and that’s limiting.”

Returning to New York after grad school began an all-out job search in the independent schools for Lydon: “Job searches are always nasty. You spend so many hours, writing, thinking, and fine-tuning your résumé and cover letters. It’s an all-consuming and necessarily anxiety-producing process.” Lydon was focused on a Grade 3 position and was traveling to New York for an interview when Bill Hill, the English department chair at Collegiate “because of a friend, unearthed [her] résumé from the bottom of a pile and said, ‘We can’t offer you a job because of your lack of experience, but I think we should talk.’”

Talk they did, and the meeting moved from discussion to interview. Lydon was invited to give a sample lesson to seventh graders the next day.

“I was so excited and completely terrified,” Lydon says. Armed with a Norton’s Anthology, she chose Langston Hughes’ “Theme for English B,” and went to work planning her sample class. The next day, behind the seventh-grade boys in the classroom were three Collegiate teachers, the head of the middle school, and the English department chair. “It was a situation that makes you want to throw up on your shoes,” Lydon says. “But it turned out to be a lot of fun. “Theme for English B” is a reflection on identity, so it seemed a perfect fit for seventh graders, and the boys really responded. I’ve come to realize and appreciate the fact that, at Collegiate, the boys feel very little stigma for being original, for being honest—saying what they think and feel. We had a really good time.”

She earned the appointment at Collegiate and has just finished the first semester of her second year. “I have had amazing mentors in Bill Hill and Pascale Giroux, the people with whom I teach sixth and seventh grade, respectively. They are both gifted teachers and have been immensely supportive and generous with their experience and knowledge. I know that I have been far from perfect, but I’ve been learning, and I love what I do.

“When you say, at the end of a year, that you actually love your students, it may seem strange to some people, but you have a fierce feeling of protectiveness about them. They have all learned so much, and grown so much, and worked so hard. It’s wonderful when parents thank you, but it is really their boys who did the work. I have frequent and open dialogues with parents, and the boys know that. They know I will call their parents at the drop of a hat, and as a result, they know that they have a team in their corner, supporting them, listening to them, and reminding them of the boundaries that are so important for this age group.

“I’m very aware of what a privileged community Collegiate is. The things we can do as teachers always amaze me. We’re both lucky and spoiled. I do try to impress on the boys the idea that they are fortunate. Even though it’s difficult for young people to appreciate experiences outside their own, I frequently talk with them about how lucky they are, and about the responsibility that comes along with being given an education of this quality. I expect each boy to think carefully about how to make a positive impact on our local and global communities.

“So much of my teaching is based on my Milton experience. When I went into this job, I was terrified of being a teacher who just took up time in students’ lives. I remember talking with friends and saying, ‘If I can’t be the kind of English teacher John Zilliax and Dale DeLetis have been, then I just don’t want to do it.’ My teaching is based on the strengths of those teachers. The number of things that I’m teaching directly from John Zilliax’s tenth grade English class is amazing.

“I love being in the classroom. Since the boys change every year, my job isn’t ever the same two years in a row. Also, teaching itself isn’t something I think you ever completely master. I’m always re-thinking and refining.”

CDE

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