Rich Halas

“I feel most likely to succeed when I am given students and autonomy. I do not require additional fuel so much as the removal of friction.”

Q: Name | Location | Years in Education

Rich Halas | Hopewell VA | 14

Q: Tell us the story of your journey to becoming an educator. What are the significant waypoints along that path?

I went to college to major in environmental conservation. In my first semester, I started coaching wrestling at the local high school and realized I wanted to work with teenagers and keep giving back to the sport I loved. I quickly changed my major to Secondary Education in English, and I never looked back. 

Q: Who inspired you (friend, family, coach, mentor, guide, sponsor, advisor) to become an educator, and/or get involved in education?

For most people, great teachers inspire them to become teachers, but mine had the opposite effect. My best teachers were so great that I didn't think I had a chance at doing the job as well as they did. Instead, it was my student athletes who gave me the confidence and taught me that you don't have to be an expert in order to help young people; you just have to care. They and the coaches on the staff that I joined were instrumental in encouraging me to pursue a career in education.

Q: When (and where) do you feel you are most likely to succeed as you practice your educational art, and your educational craft?

“I feel most likely to succeed when I am given students and autonomy. I do not require additional fuel so much as the removal of friction. ”

I work with many students who have failed in the past, and I am consistently impressed with how much potential they have to succeed. In many ways, my largest task with them is helping them overcome the damage our system has done to their confidence and joy in the learning process. Once I have gotten the bad taste of status quo education drudgery out of their mouth, success almost feels easy. 

Q: What are the skills you feel most confident using in your life, and work in education?

The skills I have worked hardest to develop, especially over the last decade have been intrapersonal skills, particularly based in listening and empathy. I'm so much better now than I used to be at getting to know people, understanding their needs, and finding out how best to work with them. I used to be so eager to get to work that I would skip that step, not even realizing that many of those skills needed to even exist, let alone be practiced and improved upon. Now I realize how essential that groundwork is to working with people of all ages.

Q: What are the most significant challenges you are working to overcome as you define what school could be?

I think "What School Could Be" is the perfect name for this community because getting people to ask that question is one of my largest challenges. We have so many creative and talented people working in education whose classes are run like computer software because they haven't fathomed the notion of breaking the status quo. They've always taught X on week Y using method Z because that's what the veteran teacher in the room next to them had been doing for 20 years when they arrived. Systems can feel comfortable and much easier in a line of work that typically exists outside of one's comfort zone and demands great effort. It's much easier to use someone else's blueprint than to design your own. However, if we never stopped innovating designs for different use cases we'd still be driving Model-T's and we'd still marvel at the notion of flying 120 feet over the course of 12 whole seconds. Usually, if I can get a teacher to realize it's possible to be innovative, they come up with things I never would have on my own. If I can get an administrator to see what our "at risk" students are capable of, I can get them to realize that it's not risky to avoid test prep and strictly regimented traditional lessons; it's a risk to continue them.

Q: Describe some of the most rewarding moments in your time in education; those crazy days when you knew you were having an impact...and it felt really good.

In many ways, I'm fortunate to work with the kids who are behind and dangerously close to dropping out or failing to graduate on time. When I see a seed of confidence begin to germinate in students who thought they hated school or had been convinced they weren't smart enough to be successful, there's nothing better.

This year, I had students working on a piece of writing where they were asked to write and justify their personal opinions on something. One of my students clearly had ChatGPT do the writing for him. It had none of his voice, humor, or overall personality. It was mechanically well written but void of the personal input the assignment asked for. I did not simply give the student a zero for cheating. I spoke with him and he reasoned that AI could write better than he could with none of the work. I went through one of the prompts with him verbally and I typed his words verbatim. I then showed him his own words and the AI-generated text. I asked him which was better, and his eyes welled up. His final product was nearly professional in writing quality. These kinds of moments mean the most to me.

Q: What do you most want to learn from this global online community of your fellow educator-leaders?

“I want to know how people are attacking the same problems that I am from different angles.”

I want to see what strategies are successful for them. How are other people finding success in spite of the system when it seems designed to fail? I also want to share and offer my own help to people who have faced the same challenges I've been able to navigate. This community has always been an inspirational tool for me when I'm feeling like I'M the crazy one, but it also has massive potential as a problem-solving tool.

Q: What is something quirky that you love about yourself and would help other community members to get to know you?

I love engaging in healthy discourse with those who see things differently than I do. I've learned to engage with opposing opinions in a manner where I seek to understand others better and get them to understand me rather than ignoring others while expecting them to conform to my beliefs and positions. 

“It is so much more interesting for me to volley with someone who sees the world a different way than it is to simply nod along with someone as we walk in lockstep. ”

I also find I have the most to learn from those who think the least like I do. While this makes many people uncomfortable, I have learned to love it. Offering dissent is not inherently insulting, and those who think differently than I do are not inherently my enemies.

Q: Ben Franklin supposedly said, "Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise." You might think Ben was full of baloney, but we are wondering when YOU are most awake, alive, productive, creative, and/or reflective. Early morning, late at night, some other time?

I'm an all-day person. I wake up and often physically, literally JUMP out of bed. Even if I didn't get enough sleep, I know that my time alive is limited, and I'm going to spend every part of the day in "go mode" whether it's teaching in the morning, coaching, and/or working out in the afternoon,  indulging in recreational time in the evening. I CAN tell you when I'm NOT productive, and that's when I'm sitting in a typical data meeting while someone who can't do my job talks down to me about it.

Q: Cold night, snow out, warm fire, hot beverage, or hot day, white sand beach, shorts and slippers, cold beverage?

I'll take the hot chocolate on a snowy evening every time. I have no interest in lounging on beaches.

Q: The coolest thing that happened to me today (the day I am filling out this form) was…

I had a conversation with a student intern (and several other teens who were listening to us) as they were in school working for our tech department over the summer. She went to McDonalds for lunch. As she finished eating, I asked her a number of questions about her choice to go out and spend money on fast food, how often she did it, and what kinds of choices might be better for her physical and mental health. My questions of her led to her and the other students asking me questions about physical and financial responsibility which leads me to believe they will be eating differently and using their money more carefully moving forward.

Q: Putting on your futurist cap: What might your school/learning spaces (or “schools” in general) look and sound and feel like in 25 or 50 years?

I hope they look like experiences more than conventional standards and assessments. the internet and our access to it have made the memorization of facts and even the learning of many traditional skills obsolete. I don't need to know how to calculate a percentage when my phone can do it if I ask Google. I don't need to go to school to access literature when a library of knowledge that ancient Alexandrians could not fathom now fits in one person's hand. I hope that in the coming decades, we focus on getting kids to collaborate in ways they never thought. I hope we give them opportunities to work as individuals to create unique products that fill them with pride. I hope that we now take we can recognize that today's entire curricula are just tomorrow's tools for a whole new evolution of goals. 

Q: And finally, what do you think is the purpose of education? (Clearly not a small question, but we hope you enjoy responding!)

For me, the purpose of education is to give students what they're not getting at home. Parents are society's first and most important teachers, but they can't do it all on their own. None of us are experts in everything, so we trust our elementary teachers to use their expertise to turn youngsters into readers, explorers, and dreamers. We trust our middle school science teachers to give them the tools to navigate the world and test assumptions. We trust high school history teachers to give them the context for the world they're inhabiting. 

“We are all trusted to fill the gaps and prepare the next generation to carry the torch, and I can’t think of a more important purpose than that.”