Who Is Candice Kelsey . . .

Candice M. Kelsey is the cofounder of a private high school in Santa Monica, California, where she spends her days mediating online-related dramas among her students. She earned her M.A. from Loyola Marymount University and has more than 200 hours of professional development in education and teen counseling. She is an evaluator for the College Board’s Advanced Placement program, the S.A.T., and the U.S. Department of Education.

She frequently attends national educational conferences and has researched the influence of the Internet on youth culture for more than eight years. Kelsey lives with her husband and two children in Los Angeles.

Who I Am, Part I: Confessions of a Retired Tackling Dummy

I was born the third child to a devoted stay-at-home mother and a Navy submariner in New England.  We were a spirited family with a real sense of adventure, especially for all things physical.  Often my father would generate expeditions that left my mother aghast; for example, at age three I joined my two older brothers and my father on the roof of the house to get a better look at the stars.  I think that was the first time I heard my mother mention the word divorce. The next thing I knew my father and my brothers had me flying down the cliff in our back yard and skimming the surface of our pool while barely hanging onto a pulley. Indeed, my father instilled a true joy for life in his children.  Finished with his military service, my father became an engineer for General Electric Co., and we soon relocated to the other side of the world: Hong Kong. 

Upon returning to the states, we set up house in Cincinnati, Ohio; we traded in caves for creeks, snakes for suburbia, and typhoons for tornadoes. This major transition led to my love for writing. At age 8 I began to write poetry; as bad as it was, I clearly used it to emote. It was this era of my life that could be called “the tackle dummy years.” My 13 and 14 year old brothers were avid weight lifters and football players; they also realized the inherent value of an 8 year old defenseless little sister. Many a night I would end up perched on an old mattress in the basement with pillows tied around my waist and an oversized Bengals helmet on my head — THUMP — acting as a tackling dummy for Tom and Chris. To this day I take a certain amount of credit in their college football successes (and I’m sure they take some credit in my being one tough chick)!

When my brothers left for college, I entered high school; lonely for their companionship, I struggled academically.  However, once I had Mrs. Klefus for American literature my junior year, and she introduced me to the Transcendentalists, I seemed to come alive intellectually. Many a night I would spend hours in the bathtub reading Thoreau and Emerson — truly a weird kid.  But hey, it was a lot more sane than being knocked prostrate in a musty basement by two oversized defensive linemen. An English major at Miami University (of Ohio), I thrived academically.  What could be better than spending four years reading literature and writing endlessly about it?  Graduation, however, presented a new dilemma for me: to accept my appointment to the Peace Corps on the Ivory Coast of Africa or to commit to Loyola University of Chicago for law school.  I made the wrong decision — I attended law school. 

For the past 8 years I have taught English to 6^th through 12^th graders in Los Angeles. One of the best fruits of this labor is meeting my husband, Kevin, who also teaches and is the best darn basketball coach. We live a life devoted to our students and, of course, our daughter Georgia Rae (named after the John Hiatt song) and son Mike (who oddly enough resembles Wilbur in Charlotte’s Web).  Luckily we don’t have a basement! 

Who I Am, Part II: A Pedagogical Love Story

O head! [T]hou hast seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!
(Melville, Moby-Dick, 1851)

I fell in love in the fall of my junior year of high school. As cliché as it is, my adolescent world was turned upside down when Mrs. Klefus introduced me to the Transcendentalist musings of Emerson and Thoreau; it was their loving one-two punch that knocked some proverbial sense into me at the age of sixteen. The next thing I knew, I was begging my mom to take me to the Cincinnati public library rather than to Moeller High School’s All Saints’ Festival: my love affair with literature had officially begun.

Even though most high school romances fail, somehow we remained tethered for life. My appreciation for the written word continued throughout college and graduate school as I studied literature and composition in more depth; in fact, as my knowledge broadened, my respect deepened. At times, I couldn’t believe how blessed I was to spend my days in class discussing the revolutionary style of Faulkner or the importance of Xenia in Homer’s Odyssey. I suppose the honeymoon had not ended. Of course, there were some rough years; weathering the esoteric readings of Foucault, Gilbert and Gubar, and Derrida created some tension – nothing a romantic little getaway to Jasper Fforde’s fictional England couldn’t repair!

And now, what better way to share my passion than to strive to ignite flames anew in the youth of today. I sincerely believe that the study of language is inherently inspirational; it is not coincidence that as we become an increasingly image-centered society the realized creativity in students has diminished.  My goal as an educator, as an English teacher, is to revivify the creative teenager, to resurrect that fossilized creature from the tombs of media-saturation.  Students today crave truth. They are painfully observant and have “seen enough to split the planets”; many are jaded by the hypocrisy in society and are often written off as cynical, even unreachable. In my seven years of secondary education, I have yet to meet the child who not only cannot be reached, but who does not want to be reached. As Neil Postman argues in his critique of education in America, “[w]ithout a narrative, life has no meaning. Without meaning, learning has no purpose. Without a purpose, schools are houses of detention, not attention” (End of Education).  I feel strongly that the role of the educator is not to prepare the student for a job, but to prepare the student to learn for the joy of learning. My goal, therefore, is to provide the meaning by way of the great narratives of civilization, to connect with students, to infuse them with the electricity of literature, and to empower them with a voice, a “syllable.”