Fifty Years Ago is a Long Time

Sept. 25, 2014

The year was 1963. A couple of weeks before the assassination of President John Kennedy, Dr. Dan Morgan had his senior year career advising appointment with Richard Patterson, a counselor at East Detroit High School. Their conversation is vivid, a memory which he remembers to this day:

Patterson: “So what will you be doing after graduation?” 

Morgan: “Probably going to college.” 

P: “Where?” 

M: “Western Michigan University…some of my friends are going there I think.” 

P: “What do you want to do?” 

M: “Probably be a teacher.” 

P: “What subject do you want to teach?”

M: “Not Math. Not Chemistry or Physics. Maybe English. Maybe History.”

P: “What about special ed? I used to be a speech correctionist.”

M: “You mean like the kids in the Erin Building”? (The Erin Building was a separate facility on the EDHS campus where students with disabilities went to school.)

P: “That would be a good choice for you.” (Patterson did not know anything about Morgan.)

M: “I’ll check into it.” 

Morgan entered WMU in September 1964 as a declared special education major. Like many students, Dr. Morgan’s primary concern about college was how he was going to pay for his education. After some research he discovered that there were scholarships and government loan programs available for prospective special education teachers: 

“I applied for and was awarded a full-ride tuition scholarship ($300 for the academic year!) from the Kalamazoo Chapter of Michigan Association of Emotionally Disturbed Teachers (MAEDT) after I was able to convince them that I wanted to teach emotionally disturbed students and not students with mental retardation as my application letter originally indicated. I was also awarded a National Defense Education Act loan for $600 for my freshman year.” 

Combined with his savings from a part-time job as a drug store clerk, he had his freshman year expenses covered. For his sophomore year he again received a full-ride scholarship and loan. The $1200 loans were ultimately forgiven because of the years he taught as a special education teacher.

It wasn’t until his junior year that he began major-specific courses. 

“I remember a field trip to Coldwater State Hospital in the Introduction to Special Education course where we observed children who, today, would be educated in neighborhood schools. I also remember my only pre-student teaching field experience tutoring a “troubled” student that was arranged by a community mental health agency. My Psychopathology of Childhood course did not really prepare me for my special education student teaching experience in the adolescent unit at the Kalamazoo State Hospital teaching 8 boys and girls all day beginning with the second day of the semester. What prepared me better were the courses I completed in the Psychology Department. I took Dr. Dick Mallot’s first Experimental Psychology course in 1966. The lessons I learned conducting experiments with rats and pigeons had a profound impact on my approach to teaching that have stuck with me throughout my career.”

It took Dr. Morgan 4 and a half years to finish his undergraduate degree. He graduated in December 1968 with several teaching offers. One was from Detroit Public Schools as a teacher of 35 socially maladjusted elementary students: “I had recently read Jonathan Kozol’s Death at an Early Age and, while inspiring, I didn’t think I had what it would take to survive that assignment as a brand new teacher who really didn’t know what he was doing.” Instead, he accepted an offer to be the Crisis Teacher at Ottawa Junior High School in the Lakeview School District in St. Clair Shores. “I was a mid-year replacement for a teacher who had taken a leave of absence due to a ‘nervous breakdown’.” Today, he believes her departure would be more accurately described as “burnout”, which Morgan describes as “a too often occurrence among special education teachers.”

Dr. Morgan taught at Ottawa for a year and a half, leaving for a full-ride masters fellowship at Michigan State University during the 1971-72 academic year. Following MSU, he accepted a job as a Teacher Consultant in Mt. Pleasant. MI, where he worked until resigning at the end of the school year in 1974 to work on his Ph.D. at Florida State University. After FSU, Dr. Morgan accepted a position as an Assistant Professor at Utah State University in Logan, UT where he served as a member of the faculty and as Department Head for over 30 years. 

“The opportunity to return to WMU in 2009 came at the right time for me on a personal basis. In the back of my mind was the realization that, if I could make it until 2014, I will have completed a 50-year circle from the time I entered WMU as a freshman special education major in 1964. My experiences as an undergraduate at WMU continue to significantly influence my professional goals. I want to do what I can do to ensure that students graduating as special education majors have a set of starter skills that will make their first year of teaching more successful and less stressful than my first years of teaching. That ten minute session with Mr. Patterson began my journey as a special educator and the clock is still running.”