Today’s Project 100 memory comes from Kyle Burke.  He was born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  Kyle’s father joined the Marines when he was 18 in order to avoid being drafted into the Army.  Beginning in 1968, he served for two years in Vietnam.  When he returned, he became a police officer and later a postal worker, both in Philadelphia.   His mother worked for many years as a clerk and as an administrative assistant for the Philadelphia Public Defender’s Office.  When he was ten years old, his family moved to New Jersey but just right across the river in Cinnaminson.  He graduated from Cinnaminson High School in 2008.  Later in life, after his parent’s divorced, his mother became the first person in his family to get a college degree, just a year or two before Kyle.  While he was in high school, he was a good baseball player and played for the University of Virginia’s summer team.  He ended up not getting a Division I offer, but he did get an opportunity to play baseball at Rowan.  So, he enrolled in the Fall of 2008.  Five years later, he graduated in 2013 with a history and secondary education degree.  He had a great student teaching experience in Palmyra High School.  After he graduated, he applied to 55 schools for jobs.  He got three replies and only one interviewed him.  That interview was for a part-time job teaching history at Moorestown High School.  During this time, he continued coaching at Palmyra and Cinnaminson.  In his second year at Moorestown, he became full-time.  During his fourth year, he began coaching baseball and soccer at Moorestown.  He is finishing his tenth year at Moorestown.  He no longer coaches baseball but continues to coach soccer. 

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I chose Rowan because I had an offer to play baseball. Beyond that, I don’t have a good reason for why I came to Rowan over places like The College of New Jersey (TCNJ).  In any event, I could not handle playing baseball and taking classes at Rowan.  It was too much to balance, so I dropped playing for Rowan in my first year.  I did take a job helping to coach baseball back at Cinnaminson High School.  In addition to this, I worked a variety of other jobs, one was at a soap factory and many others were at restaurants, all while attending at Rowan.  I had a couple of small scholarships, but I had to pay for everything else at Rowan.  Of course, even as much as I worked, I had to take out loans, ending with about $40,000 of debt.  I still have around $5,000 to pay off.

I began as a journalism major, and I then switched to biology. I didn’t know what I wanted to do until I met John Constantino.  He made me feel like I could become a history teacher and that it would be a great time.  I had him for a World History survey.  I remember him picking up a textbook, throwing it in the trash, and giving the student a $100 bill.  He was a stand-up comedian as a professor.  He had a photographic knowledge, and he made you feel like you had been transported to the past.  It was a class where folks competed to be called upon by him.  He was funny as hell.  You wanted to spend time with him. I thought he was too funny to be factual, but I could never find anything that he said that was not completely accurate.

Other faculty that influenced me included David Applebaum.  Today, I borrow some of his cadence in my classes.  He was eccentric, but he showed me how to unfold conversations in class, how to have detailed discussions that resonate.  I had Historical Methods with Jim Heinzen.  He showed me that I wasn’t working as hard as I could and that I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was.  I took him for Stalinism, and he taught me how to write.  I had you Dr. Carrigan for American West and Dr. Kress for Senior Seminar.   

My semester of student teaching was transformative for me.  My cooperating teacher was Dan Licata.  He was also a baseball coach and a history teacher.  He showed me how to teach and showed me how to reach the wide range of students – the rich and the poor, the engaged and the apathetic – that we had in our school.  He asked me to help him coach on the baseball team, and we had great success in developing players who had very little baseball experience before us.  We spent a lot of time together. I even introduced him to his wife.  We remain great friends to this day. 

The history department gave me a sense of purpose.  I had always liked history and done well, but most people I knew considered history boring, and I never saw myself teaching the subject.  After walking into John Constantino’s class, I stopped seeing history as just a hobby.  As I explored the major more, I continued to encounter faculty who showed me that teaching history could be meaningful and engaging.  They also pushed me to improve my reading and writing skills.  Before long, I began to see that I could teach history for a living and that such a career could be rewarding for my future students but also, at the same time, fun, engaging, and exciting.  In my own teaching today, I try my best to do this, borrowing approaches and strategies from what I saw in my college classes.

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This is part of the Department of History’s “Project 100,” the collection and sharing of one hundred memories by Glassboro State College and Rowan University alumni and staff in celebration of the 100^th anniversary of the founding of Glassboro Normal School, later Glassboro State College, and now Rowan University.  Thanks to Laurie Lahey for helping proofread and edit the final versions.  Email carrigan@rowan.edu with questions or corrections.  You can find the Link to all of the Project 100 entries on the Web:  https://chss.rowan.edu/departments/history/alumni_highlights/project_100/