MU| F e a t u r e s
Head of the
Class
MU’s Transition to Teaching program fills a need
E
ric Cupp ’76 can’t believe his luck
these days when he rolls out of bed to
greet another day.
It’s time to go to work. And not just any work,
but his work, the work he knows now was
always there waiting for him.
He’s a chemistry, physics and biology teacher
and assistant boys soccer coach at his alma
mater, Lafayette Jefferson High School in
Lafayette, Ind. And if that is not what he
thought he’d be doing, or where, when he came
to Manchester University six years ago ... well,
sometimes life follows its own path.
The trick is knowing when to tag along.
“If I could talk to 18-year-old Eric, I would
definitely say, ‘Hey, get your act together, bud,
you need to make this change sooner,’” Cupp
says. “This is definitely what I was meant to do.”
That he’s doing it owes much to happenstance,
and even more to Manchester’s Transition
To Teaching (T2T) program, which has been
around a good while but perhaps has never
served a greater purpose. It’s a secondary-
education program that enables qualified
students with at least a bachelor’s degree to
enter the teaching profession in the same area
as their degree. It’s designed for adults who
decide to transition into teaching from
another profession (and for which they can
gain Life Experience Credit), and students
who decide at some point they’d like to
teach.
“I think the Transition To Teaching
program fills a need that’s there,” says
Heather Schilling ’90, associate professor
and director of teacher education at
Manchester. “I think we’re at the point in
education where Transition To Teaching
and other ways of being creative about how
we educate people and prepare the next
generation of teachers (is crucial). We’re at a
tipping point.”
Those tipping points, for students in the
T2T program, come at all times and in all
circumstances.
Cupp, for instance, came to Manchester as
a biology-chemistry major intent on going
to medical school, but halfway through his
junior year he moved into the T2T program,
deciding he’d rather teach. In the end, he
wound up graduating as a chemistry major,
but applied the education classes he was
taking toward T2T. The program’s flexibility
also allowed him to push some of it back
a semester when a series of family matters
demanded his attention.
“It allowed me to do financially what I needed
to do in getting a job, but also finishing the
classes,” Cupp says. “It also really gave me the
freedom to live the life I wanted to live and do
the things I needed to do in that year.”
Now he’s at Lafayette Jeff, following his true
path. It’s what T2T was designed to help him do.
“People who prepare teachers need to make
a decision how much in the game do we want
somebody outside (to) take control,” Schilling
says. “Which I think has been the problem with
education. I wrestled with this in Transition To
Teaching because at first I was like ‘Oh, gosh,
we’re going to be licensing these people who
didn’t really want to be teachers to start with.’
“But I’ve really shifted the way I think about
that, because I see enough of our own students
who get to their junior year and say ‘You know
what, I really want to teach. Why didn’t I think
about this earlier?’”
By Benjamin Smith
Manchester | 29