Robert Wilson, Middle School Dean of Students and Math Teacher
By Kathy McPherson
Robert Wilson was teacher of the year for Durham Public Schools in 1989-1990 and he received Durham Academy’s Hershey Distinguished Faculty Award in 2000. But that doesn’t begin to compare with the honor he felt when a DA student chose to write about him for the sixth grade’s annual My Hero project. That happened not once but three times — in 2013, 2014 and 2015 — and Wilson proudly displays the colorful “My Hero” books on his office bookcase.
“Those are my three greatest honors. In terms of any sort of professional recognition I’ve ever had, those are the ones that are dearest to me.”
“Understanding,” “extremely encouraging” and “patient” are words his former students wrote in the hero books to describe Wilson, who taught math and served as a fifth grade advisor for 24 years. In 2014, Wilson was named Middle School dean of students, the first person to hold that position, and he also teaches two sections of math.
Many of the empathetic character traits Wilson’s students describe can be traced to his experience working at a wilderness school for emotionally disturbed boys. He took time off from college and spent 15 months in 1978-1979 as a counselor at Camp Shon Tai, which is Cherokee for “moving up,” working with 12- to 14-year-olds who were there as an alternative to reform school or to being institutionalized. The boys came from North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland and the Washington, D.C., area, and many of them had criminal convictions or had been expelled from their state school system.
“That was a real eye-opening experience. It was pretty crazy most of the time. The amount of stuff I learned from it is so vast. One lesson that comes to mind is that most of the time things in our lives aren’t as bad as you think. … The truth of the matter is it can be so, so much worse. It gave me a wide perspective.”
The wilderness school worked on natural consequences. If a boy was bickering, fighting or stealing, the group of 10 boys and counselors would stop whatever they were doing and sit down to solve the problem by defining it, explaining why it was wrong and making some sort of amends.
“On a bad day that could take six to eight hours. If it went through a meal, we didn’t eat. That was pretty intense. The worst day I remember was in 1979. There was a lot of snow that year and there was maybe 18 to 24 inches on the ground. We spent 21 of 24 hours sitting outside in the snow.”
Those experiences are what made Wilson decide to work with adolescents when he returned to Warren Wilson College to pursue a degree in education. “I figured it could not get worse than that, and I survived that. Actually, I felt like I was pretty effective at helping those kids.”
Wilson’s first teaching job was at a middle school near Asheville. He was hoping to teach social science and history, but the principal had something else in mind. He saw on Wilson’s résumé that he had worked at a wilderness school and had high scores in math and science on the National Teacher Examination. He asked if Wilson would be willing to teach math and science to students that teachers had identified as the one or two students with serious behavioral problems. There were no academic expectations. The goal was just to get them to come to class on time and to have them sit through class.
“I had a really good year. … It allowed me to be really creative about what I was teaching and how to teach it to all different sorts of learners.”
The principal was pleased and assured Wilson he’d have a job there the next year. But there was a change in principals over the summer and the new principal had promised someone else a job.
“My wife and I were going to be married in September, and I found out a week before school started that I didn’t have a job. That was pretty stressful. You don’t want your daughter to marry some guy that’s unemployed!”
A job opened up for him at a middle school in Asheville, and after a year there Wilson moved back to his hometown of Durham and took a job at Holton Middle School. The school was in a rough area of East Durham, and nearly all the students qualified for the federally funded free or reduced price breakfast and lunch program. He taught seventh- and eighth-grade science, math and reading, and coached football, basketball and track. Rodney Rogers, who went on to play at Wake Forest and in the NBA, was one of Wilson’s basketball players.
“We had a wonderful administrator there, Mr. [Herbert] Tatum. We were supposed to be following the state curriculums, but I’ve never been a great rule follower. Mr. Tatum encouraged me. … I knew what the objectives were, I had a good sense of how to teach those objectives to the kids and it worked. Rather than try to make me fit the state curriculum, he supported me a great deal and I appreciated that.”
While teaching at Holton in 1989, Wilson was one of 15 teachers from Durham public and independent schools chosen to participate in the German American Teacher Exchange. Durham Academy served as the host school for program, which sent Durham teachers to Germany for six weeks of summer travel and brought German teachers to Durham for six weeks in the spring.
“It was one of the most amazing experiences I’ve ever been a part of, both the American and the German side of it. It was an unbelievable experience. It was the first time I had ever been to Europe, and it’s how I got to know Durham Academy.”
The introduction to Durham Academy soon proved beneficial to both Wilson and DA. A change in leadership at Holton resulted in a principal who asked teachers to do a large amount of additional paperwork at the end of the school year. Wilson was the only faculty member to question the principal about the additional paperwork. He was told it had to be done and paychecks would be withheld for teachers who did not comply.
“It came to the last day, and most of the teachers had turned in none of the paperwork. I had done it all, and it took a long time. The principal started handing out paychecks. I said ‘What’s going on?’ The principal said ‘I figured since nobody did it, it must not have been a reasonable thing to ask.’ I went straight to my room and called Jim Speir [then DA’s assistant headmaster] and asked if he had an opening, and he did. That’s how I ended up at Durham Academy. There was so little support for teachers, and for teachers who are putting their all into it every day, it just gets to the point where you have to make choices.”
Wilson arrived at the Middle School in 1990 and quickly became a favorite with the fifth-graders whom he taught math and had in his advisory. Teaching is rewarding to him — “grading papers, grading quizzes, giving kids feedback, trying to improve a student’s ability to either problem-solve, think, analyze, whatever that happens to be.”
And the actual time in the classroom with students? “That’s just fun for me — listening, trying to pay really, really close attention to subtleties, recognizing good questions and keeping the kids engaged.”
Wilson has distinct memories of his own school days. “I remember all my teachers. I remember all my classes. I wasn’t that good a student, particularly when I got to high school.”
But he was good at sports, playing football, basketball and baseball through ninth grade and football and basketball at Durham High School, where he earned All America football honors his junior year. He was a wide receiver on a team that threw 55 to 60 passes a game, so “I ended up with a lot of receptions.”
Wilson learned a lot from his teachers, “particularly stuff I wouldn’t want to do. As kind of hokey as this sounds, I really do try to live by the golden rule and I try desperately to treat other people like I would want to be treated myself. Throughout my career I’ve made it a point to get back into the classroom, to get back on the other side of the desk to see what that feels like for a while, too.” He earned a Masters in School Administration from UNC in 2007.
As Middle School dean of students, Wilson is working more with discipline issues and with students who may be struggling, and he wants to be more proactive and less reactive.
“I think about that constantly. I think about a lot of things, I give myself a chance to think about things. I’m big on reflection. I look back a lot to learn or to try to glean something here or there to help me make a more informed decision. I don’t like to rush into decisions and I don’t like to make mistakes. If I make a mistake, I only want to make that mistake once.”
It’s well known at the Middle School that Wilson is a dedicated fisherman, so how does fishing fit into his life at school?
“I view my classroom as like a pond, and I have the whole thing scoped out. … I ask a lot of questions, which to me is like casting a lure into the water and seeing if I can get somebody to bite on it. When they do, it’s a lot of fun."
“Kids will ask me sometime when I ask a question, ‘Mr. Wilson, are you fishing now? Everybody watch out, he’s fishing.’ That will be a question that’s a little more complex or has some subtlety to it.”
And then there’s just the patience that comes with fishing.
“I’m an artificial bait fisherman. Whether it be flies or some sort of lure, there’s constant analysis of either you’re catching fish or you’re getting some bites or you’re not. You’re constantly reading the water, thinking about the breeze or where the sun is, where the deeper water is or structure, that sort of thing. For me, it’s a very intellectually engaging activity and I can cast and retrieve really all day long. I like fishing, and fishing and catching are two different things.
“With my [Middle School] fishing club, I tell the kids and I figured this out, the more time you spend fishing, the more time you spend not catching fish. There are times when you just don’t catch. The fish aren’t biting, the conditions aren’t right, whatever. … So when you catch one, it’s really great. And it doesn’t matter what kind it is to me.”
Wilson is a “catch and release” guy, and he fishes seven days each summer in an area known as The Manitou in Northwest Ontario, Canada. His fishing partner is a former DA dad who lives in Chicago now. “We fish 16 hours a day, hard, and we love it. It’s just us two in a boat, and we talk about all sorts of things.”
Wilson began fishing at age 4 with his dad, but son Ian, a DA sophomore, is not a fan of fishing. Family activities for Wilson, his wife, Barbara, and Ian are more likely to be “boogie boarding in decent surf, traveling, eating good food, kayaking, skiing and visiting family.”
When Wilson looks back on his childhood, there’s one thing really stands out to him.
“I remember being a kid, and every once in a while there would be an adult, and whether they were acting like they were listening to you or whether they actually were listening, I remember those adults. I remember how much I revered a relationship with an adult that I actually felt was listening to me and had some understanding of who I was or how I was feeling. At least they were listening to me.
“In terms of treating other people the way I’d like to be treated, I listen very carefully to kids, and I can empathize with most of whatever they have to deal with or to say, their ideas and thoughts.”