On his path to teaching …
I graduated from Beaver in 1984, went off to Colby College, majored in religion, got a job right out of Colby sweeping floors in a warehouse, and then started to do some teaching in rural Maine. The minute I walked into a classroom I sort of recognized that was where I needed to be. I worked for five years at Oxford Hills High School in South Paris, Maine, and then determined that I might as well go get a master’s degree. I left Oxford Hills and did a master’s program at the experienced teachers program at Harvard for a year.

I finished that up, got married, and my wife and I picked up stakes and moved to Mexico. I taught a year in a village in the middle of Central Mexico for a year and taught English and history. Then we moved back to Maine and I taught for three years at a school just to the west of Portland, at Gorham High School. It was at Gorham that I was really able to dig in and begin to do some innovative and interdisciplinary stuff. I team-taught most of my schedule. There was an English teacher by the name of Derek Pierce and he’s gone on to do some cool stuff, but we sort of developed an American studies curriculum, and then I sort of took a three-year leave from education.

On momentarily leaving education …
I had become discouraged that public education wasn’t going to be able to make some fundamental changes. I also have a hundred-ton captain’s license, so I actually was working on the water for a few years. I started a local franchise of a nationwide company called Seatow that sort of does AAA for boats—marine towing and salvage. I really loved that work. I was also involved in starting Duck Boat tours here in Portland. I got hired to be a General Manager of that operation.

… and then returning …
And then 9/11 happened. The place I wanted to be most in all of that confusion and all of that post-9/11 soul-searching was back in the classroom. I felt like that was where I could use my passion for trying to understand the world to help other people and teach them how to understand the world.

So I went back into the classroom in 2002 at Falmouth High School just north of Portland. I taught there for ten years before I became assistant principal, and this is my eighth year as assistant principal. I was a social studies teacher, I served on the Portland school committee for six years, I was chairman of the Portland School Committee for two of those, finance chair, policy chair. One of the things we were able to do when I was on the board, was we established a third high school in the city of Portland called Casco Bay High School, which is an expeditionary learning school.

On helping to establish Casco Bay High School …
Conveniently, it was my former team-teaching partner Derek Pierce that ended up being the Principal of that school, the founding principal. Portland is an interesting town; it’s got a large immigrant population. For a town of 63,000, it’s actually far more diverse than you might expect. Casco Bay has done a really good job of taking whoever wants through the door and moving them through their expeditionary model. That was an interesting opportunity and I’m glad I was in the place to make that happen for kids.

On Sailing Ships Maine …
My latest project outside of school is I’m on the board of Sailing Ships Maine. Our goal is to bring 250 Maine high school students on board traditionally rigged sailing vessels every year, and have it so that money is not an object. I’ve had some great opportunities to organize programming and figure out ways to get kids academic credit for the time that they’re on board, and I, myself, have had the opportunity to lead a number of expeditions, including two of them from Bermuda back to Maine. That’s been a blast.

On working to find alternatives to youth incarceration …
Currently, I’m working with Sailing Ships Portland as well as Falmouth High School as well as the Maine Department of Corrections to see if we can find some alternatives to youth incarceration and young offender incarceration. The Commissioner of Corrections here is very keen on looking at anyone who is incarcerated under the age of 24 and trying to figure out if there is something else we can do for them so that they don’t become institutionalized in a mindset, and, while they’re still developing brains, to give them skills to be successful outside. Inside of school stuff I’m still very much wrapped up in being an assistant principal—being around and doing all of those things that assistant principals and teachers do.

On his time at Beaver …
I came to Beaver from Shore Country Day School up in Beverly, which, at that time, was an incredibly traditional, buttoned-down, and kind of intense school. It saw itself as a feeder to the Andovers and Exeters and the St. Paul’s and the Miltons of the world, and on to the Ivy League. In 7th and 8th grade I kind of gave them the finger, I just wasn’t going to play that game. The headmaster at the time was friends with the head of Beaver at that time, a guy named Philip McCurdy. So he said, “I think, Jon, you might want to take a look at Beaver.” I did look at Beaver and I came to Beaver in 10th grade because Shore went through the 9th grade. At the time, Beaver was a pretty standard high school curriculum, but a philosophy of allowing kids to follow their passion. I remember very clearly being told by the headmaster,”I’ve never known a kid to do better because you didn’t let them do the thing that they loved.” That’s been a fundamental piece of my educational philosophy ever since.

On Beaver helping to shape an educational philosophy …
All students are passionate about something. Our job as teachers is to help them figure out what that is if it’s not obvious to them, and then support them. One of the key things about Beaver that was great for me is that I was a theater and music guy. That was my thing and I was allowed to do as much of that as I wanted to. And it was within a structure that made it safe to take risks and that’s sort of where I found my tribe and sense of belonging. I also had some outstanding teachers. It’s funny because when my parents moved, they sent me a box of my old essays that for some reason got saved from my time at Beaver. When I sit down to grade student papers every year I look back at a couple of mine because we have this impression that we’ve always been solid writers and then you have this realization that, at one point, you were a 10th grader, too, and if somebody hadn’t pointed that out to you, you wouldn’t have gotten better. I continue to read the comments that Ms. Thomsen wrote on my English essays in 11th grade and she was right.

Really, I think the thing that was special was the relationships you could build. You knew your teachers and your teachers knew you, and there was that sense of community that allowed you to feel safe to take risks. I think that for me really the challenge as an educator, or teacher, or assistant principal, is to find out what the kid is passionate about, find out ways to have them do as much of that as they can. One of my favorite things to do is look at a kid who is at risk for not graduating and say, “What do you really love to do and how can we make that what you do to get the credits that you need?”

I had a young person last year who was in a rough spot. What he really loved to do was work on engines and he got himself a job working as a mechanic and assisting in a garage. I figured out a way to make it so that he could at least earn some of his graduation credits by doing that work. We’ve got other kids who really like to do creative stuff or service-oriented stuff. I really see my job now as an administrator is to say, “How can we do this? How can we take this passion of yours and allow you to explore it and embrace it and have us value it?” My sense when I was at Beaver was that I was valued for my uniqueness. So that’s something that I’ve always tried to carry with me. When I look back, Beaver had a huge influence on my personal approach to education and what we should be doing for students.

“My sense when I was at Beaver was that I was valued for my uniqueness.”

– Jon Radtke ’84

On some of the challenges …
When I was at Beaver in the early to mid 1980’s, it was not the school it is today. It was not as well resourced, for lots of reasons. But it was small classes. I’ve been lucky to spend my professional life in the state of Maine where I’ve never had a class, in over 30 years in the classroom, over 25. So that’s a big number, or can feel like a big number, but it’s not the 30, 35, 40 that routinely occurs in other places. The other thing I’ve found is that the biggest challenge in the world of public education is not financial, but attitude. Like all bureaucracies, it gets bogged down in its own minutiae as opposed to remembering that the institution exists for kids and our job should be how do we empower kids to do what they’re passionate about, which may or may not cost money.

And also, for example, up at Oxford Hills High School, which is rural Maine, it’s got a lot of multi-generational poverty, I was still able to work with an English teacher doing team teaching, I was still able to help kids put together musical groups and do lots of things that don’t actually cost money, but it had to take a willingness on the part of somebody to engage in a mentoring way with kids as opposed to, “I’m the teacher here. Go do this thing and then go away”

On allowing students to pursue their passions …
One of my favorite colleagues is the head of IT and his thing is, “Why can’t school be more like camp?” And I agree. Do we even give kids the opportunity to become engrossed in things anymore? To do deep thinking and problem-solving. If you go through the building, the great irony is that what kids are actually passionate about is rarely what’s happening in the classroom. It’s what they’re doing outside of the classroom, with a teacher, with an adult mentor, focused around their interests. That’s what enlivens them. You see it most obviously in athletics, where kids will spend endless hours practicing. I also see it in the theater, I see it in robotics, I see it around music. And that all usually is considered ‘extra’. And my thing is, “How can we make that not extra? But, instead, you need to spend a good chunk of your day doing what you love to do, whether it’s computer programming whether you’re in the theater, whether it’s in a ceramics studio, wherever it is.” That sort of notion is something I think I do carry over from my years at Beaver.

On technology at Beaver …
I don’t consider myself a computer guy, but we had this course that everybody had to do at Beaver when I was there in 1981/82. It was a quarter-credit course, it met like once a week or something, and it was to learn BASIC computer programming. Nobody does BASIC anymore, but that was the language we were learning and it was done on an old RadioShack TRS80 computer where the cassette tape was the memory drive. I remember my final exam was to write a program where your name gets written across the screen ten times and stops. That in and of itself was not terribly important except it taught me a fundamental thing about how computers think and the logical systems that underlie them. I use that all the time to teach to a basic problem-solving set, whether you’re trying to diagnose a diesel engine that’s not behaving correctly out at sea or you’re trying to figure out why your spreadsheets aren’t giving you the results you anticipated or why this database isn’t functioning. People said, “We teach you this because you don’t know what you’ll need to know.” They were right. At the time it was a thing we all tried to get out of. But it’s one of those things that has been very helpful in life, and strange as it seems now, it was not a very common thing in 1981 to require every student in the building to do a little computer programming.

On rethinking teaching and learning …
I think the things that I’ve worked hardest at bringing about are building off student passion and then trying to tailor education to the individual level in terms of what kids are passionate about, and creating flexibility. I guess as an administrator, my goal is to create flexibility in an inherently rigid system so that we can truly look at kids as individual human beings who have their own passions. Maybe you need to know a little algebra, too, in life, but let’s not force it on people, but really allow them to do deep learning and deep experimentation and deep design. In my perfect universe, every student’s path through secondary school should be unique. The reality is when you’ve got 170 kids in a class, you can’t necessarily do that, but I bet you can get pretty close on a lot of kids. And so for me, that’s the challenge right now. How do we have a path through high school, essentially use the design process, to make it work for kids as individuals?

At the end of the day, I absolutely find teenagers to be some of the most interesting people in the world to hang out with. It’s a gift to be standing there when they begin to truly see the world through adult eyes, and it’s a gift to me when a student sees something in the world as an injustice and they come at me with that intense teenage sense of fairness, and they’re right. There are things that are broken, now how can you be part of the solution?