Many people choose teaching. But for some people, like Philip Tuminaro, a sixth-grade teacher at New Hope Christian Academy (NHCA), teaching chooses them.
Tuminaro was attending Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, pursuing a career in radio or sound production. “But I found myself sort of bored and disillusioned by it,” he says. “I had recently become a Christian, and I was really trying to pray to God and ask what I should do with my life.”
That’s when a friend approached him with a proposal — to join him one night a week at a juvenile detention center playing basketball with kids and helping them with their homework. “At the time, I didn’t really have a desire to work with kids,” says Tuminaro. “But I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll play some hoops. I love basketball.’” To his surprise, he seemed to have a knack with the children, and, after sitting in and observing a couple of classroom teachers later on, he decided he would switch his major.
Once he received his teaching license, Tuminaro moved to Memphis to pursue a graduate program through Union University that partnered with the teacher residency training program Memphis Teacher Residency (MTR). Through this program, Tuminaro worked toward his master’s degree while student-teaching under the guidance of mentors at Whitehaven and Carver High Schools.
After he finished his residency, Tuminaro taught senior-level classes at Kingsbury High School for six years. “But my wife developed some health problems,” he says. “And it was hard keeping up with teaching at Kingsbury and taking care of my children.” So he began teaching at NHCA, where his kids could eventually attend.
Tuminaro is now in his third year at NHCA teaching English language arts. “My subject is a supplement to the science and history classes,” he says. “I’m a reading and writing teacher, as well as sort of a tutor for those other subjects.” He also teaches economics, social studies, and discipleship classes at the school.
Tuminaro strives to make classes enjoyable. “My job never gets boring,” he says. “If you want to put the work in to make the lessons fun, you all get to have a fun day.” One teaching method Tuminaro uses that the students really enjoy is having them teach or quiz each other throughout his lessons.
“I believe that if you don’t know something well enough to show someone else, then you really don’t know it,” he says. “Also, this gets them to come back and relearn what I taught them, so I’ve just basically tricked them into studying. And they have fun with it, too.”
Ultimately, Tuminaro aims for himself and students to do their best, no matter what. “When you have those bad days, you just close the door and teach as hard as you can and push the students to go as hard as they can,” he says. “You’ve got to love them and cheer them on — or ‘go hard.’ For me and my students, that seems to be a cure-all.”
For Tuminaro, one of the most rewarding things about teaching has been seeing how far some of his students have come after leaving his class and graduating. “I’m always running into former students from Kingsbury, and they’ll come up to me, shake my hand, and introduce me to their family, or they’ll tell me that they’re in college or starting their own business,” he says. “It’s really cool to see that.”
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