Country Roads publisher James Fox-Smith putting on his teaching cap with a classroom of fourth graders for the Junior Achievement Program.
My morning commute to Country Roads’ St. Francisville office takes hme past the campus of West Feliciana Parish Schools, which both our kids attended from pre-K through twelfth grade. Despite the fact that the youngest of those kids graduated in 2023, the urge to merge into the school’s drop-off line each morning remains strong—the muscle memory a daily reminder of the defining role the school played in our family life for fifteen years. Some days the fact that that chapter is so firmly in the rearview mirror still takes me by surprise. So, last month, it felt like a homecoming of sorts to be turning again into the parking lot at West Fel Elementary School, where I was to spend a week teaching a Junior Achievement course about jobs, trade, and regional resources to a class of fourth-graders.
What is Junior Achievement, you ask? It’s the question I asked during a Rotary Club meeting, which is how my name ended up on the list of volunteers in the first place. As I was to find out, Junior Achievement is a nationwide program that invites community mentors into elementary and secondary school classrooms to teach “real-world” skills like entrepreneurship, work-readiness, and financial literacy—a laudable mission that sounds like just the sort of stuff we want the nation’s bright young minds exposed to … by trained professionals.
How would I get, let alone hold, the kids’ attention? How does one keep twenty-two nine-year-olds constructively occupied for hours, anyway? What if they zone out? Act out? Walk out? Stage a coup? Laugh at me?!
But for someone with zero teaching experience, whose own children stopped listening to him around the time their voices broke, it also sounded intimidating. I’ve always been rather in awe of educators, feeling that anyone with the determination, grace, and patience to devote his or her career to teaching other people’s children to be decent, productive members of society deserves respect, a salary that reflects the societal value of the role, and possibly a medal. So, notwithstanding the fact that the Junior Achievement people equip volunteers with a ready-made curriculum and piles of support materials, I experienced considerable performance anxiety as my appointed week approached. How would I get, let alone hold, the kids’ attention? How does one keep twenty-two nine-year-olds constructively occupied for hours, anyway? What if they zone out? Act out? Walk out? Stage a coup? Laugh at me?!
To compensate for my lack of teaching experience, I built my lesson plan around the twin pillars of novelty value and bribery, (i.e. the same formula I’ve been relying on during my three decades in America to date). The week before class, I stocked up on candy and pralines, and raided my supply of small, furry, clip-on koalas, which are sold by the sackful in Australian airports, and which no expat should return from a trip to the old country without. Thus equipped and with a fair bit of trepidation, I presented myself at the door of Ms. Felder’s fourth grade classroom.
The West Feliciana Parish Schools system is one of the jewels in St. Francisville’s crown, so it was a privilege to be invited to give something back to a school that has given our community, not to mention my own family, so much.
I needn’t have worried. The combination of pralines and a peculiar accent set the tone, but from the moment the first koala made its debut (in response to a correctly answered question about supply and demand), engagement was off the charts. Ten minutes into the first session, hands were shooting up with such enthusiasm I started worrying about shoulder injuries. It wasn’t long before the entire class was bristling with clip-on marsupials. The kids were bright, responsive, eager to please, and set about each challenge and group activity with great enthusiasm. They also proved remarkably observant, which I discovered while using copies of this magazine to explain how our business works. Long after the pralines and candy were gone, I’d been hoarding one last koala, leaving him perched on top of the whiteboard while telling my four-foot-tall charges that there would be a special challenge at the end of the week to decide who got him. When the last day came, I passed around copies of Country Roads’ May “Outdoors” issue (thereby lowering the median age of our reader demographic by twenty years) and announced that the first student to spot the (large, obvious) typo on the cover that nine experienced publishing professionals had somehow failed to notice during proofing, would score the koala. It took a girl named Piper about four seconds to find it, considerably increasing my confidence in the future of independent publishing.
The West Feliciana Parish Schools system is one of the jewels in St. Francisville’s crown, so it was a privilege to be invited to give something back to a school that has given our community, not to mention my own family, so much. As we were wrapping up the final session, the kids presented me with twenty-two handmade thank-you cards. Many cards featured pictures of koalas (some considerably better than I could draw), and every one strengthened my resolve to stay involved with the institutions that make our communities better for all the people who call them home, long after our own chapters are done.
—James Fox-Smith, publisher
