“Most Likely to Succeed?” is a new column being introduced to the 2018-2019 Panel Backpage. In this column, the Backpage editors interview a highly-respected Winsor faculty member about an embarrassing or difficult time in their life, specifically during their middle school, high school, and early college years. The purpose of “Most Likely to Succeed?” is to teach Winsor’s student body that you, in fact, do not need to be fully formed at the age of 14.

“When I was in high school, I really thought that I was going to be a news reporter,” said Mr. B., who was always interested in journalism throughout his high school and college years. That was, however, until he participated in a program called “The Constitution Works,” which aims to teach young students about the inner workings of The Constitution. Mr. B. described that “from that experience, [he] realized that, you know what? [He] really wanted to be a teacher.”

Having grown up in New York City and having gone to public schools, Mr. B. anticipated that he would remain in that same sector and become a public school teacher in New York City. Due to his newfound passion, Mr. B. “worked really hard to receive all the necessary credits to graduate.” “Everything was going well,” described Mr. B., until he had “a really big challenge in one course, which was college Spanish.” “I ended up failing the course…That was devastating to me, because it had a lot of impact,” said Mr. B., who had to take summer Spanish classes to earn his degree.

After changing his summer job, Mr. B. ended up working at a school in Long Island and while he was working at that school, he heard through his boss about a fellowship in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to teach at a private school. “I had grown up in New York, I had attended college in New York, I had never left New York,” said Mr. B., expressing his apprehension when learning about the opportunity. Despite this, Mr. B. “took advantage of the opportunity,” saying that the choice “changed [his] life tremendously.”

Mr. B. has been teaching in private schools ever since; in fact, on the day of his interview, he was celebrating teaching at Winsor for 20 years. “My tenure at Winsor, my work at private schools in some ways can be attributed to me failing Spanish, because all of that would not have happened,” concluded Mr. B.. Obviously it was “not fun having to retake the course over the summer and having to rearrange the job, but it provided an unusual opportunity.”

From that experience, Mr. B. likes to tell people that “sometimes things happen that you cannot even understand…and it took [him] until years later to figure out that it seemed like there were these pieces together” and had Mr. B. not had this experience in college “it would have been a very different turn of events.” As a result of all of this, Mr. B. “has found something that’s really suited to [him], something [he] had never even heard about, had it not been for this setback and the real benefits that it afforded.”