About Rick Reed

How a Stepstone Became a Calling

I never planned to be a teacher. In fact, if you had asked me at my university commencement in 1973 what I intended to do with my life, I would have told you I was headed toward journalism or law. Teaching wasn’t even on the horizon. But something happened that day—quiet, internal but decisive. I made up my mind to pick up a few education courses over the summer, student teach in the fall and earn money to pay for law school. That was the plan.

And so that fall, I found myself at Warren Central High School in Indianapolis, standing in front of a classroom full of teenagers. I was there to student teach, nothing more. But almost immediately, something completely unexpected happened: I loved it! I loved the energy, the curiosity, the challenge, and even the chaos. I loved the way literature opened up new worlds for students, and the way their questions opened up new worlds for me.

After I finished my education courses later that year, Warren Central offered me a full-time substitute contract for the next semester. I took it, thinking it would be temporary.

About halfway through the semester, the English chair asked to take over a course designed by a teacher who was away on maternity leave. She never returned—instead, she chose to stay home with her child—and I inherited the class. It was a science fiction course, and from the moment I stepped into that room, I felt at home. Science fiction had been one of my passions since I was fifteen years old, and suddenly I was teaching it—sharing it and helping students see the wonder and possibilities in it. I realized I had not only a love for teaching but a knack for it. And I never left Warren Central. Forty years later, I retired from the same school that I had originally seen as just a stepping stone.

Carrying Forth the Canon

A turning point came in my career in the mid-1980s, when I was nominated as my district’s candidate for Indiana Teacher of the Year, in large part because of a course called Great Books. A colleague and I created it because I wanted students to experience the many aspects of the Western canon—its literature, history, art, religion—woven together into a single, rich tapestry. Designing and teaching that course was one of the great joys of my professional life. It was demanding, exhilarating, and deeply rewarding. It was in those years that I realized teaching wasn’t simply the job I had chosen over law school. It was my vocation. Soon thereafter, I was nominated as my district’s candidate for Indiana Teacher of the Year.

Over the decades, I taught everything from science fiction to fantasy to etymology. I taught AP Language and Composition, AP Literature and Composition, and a wide range of university-level courses at IUPUI (a joint campus of Indiana University and Purdue University in Indianapolis) and Concordia University, Wisconsin—Freshman Composition, Vocabulary Building, Introduction to Literature, Classical Antiquity, and Medieval Mysteries. Each course opened new doors, new conversations, and new ways of seeing the world. And each group of students reminded me why I stayed.

The Rewards

Some moments stand out more than others. I think of the engineering-minded student who took Great Books and ended up majoring in English at the University of Chicago—a decision that led the university to recognize me as an influential teacher in his life. I think of the young man preparing for a career in medicine who had to choose between the second semester of Great Books and an advanced chemistry course. He asked his chemistry teacher for advice, and the teacher told him, “The world already has enough doctors without souls. Take Great Books.” He did.

And then there are the moments that arrive years later, long after the grades are recorded and the classroom lights turned off. Just before I retired, an ER doctor from a major Chicago hospital—once one of my students—walked into my office. He wanted to thank me. Before my class he had never read much more than humor books, but his experience in my class had changed the path of his life. I have carried that moment with me ever since. It confirmed what I had long suspected: I had made the right decision all those years ago.

I could have made more money as a lawyer. But I would not have had the privilege of working with so many eager—and sometimes not-so-eager—young minds. I would not have had the chance to watch students discover themselves through literature, or to see them choose paths shaped by imagination, curiosity, and soul. I would not have had the joy of staying in touch with so many of them, offering encouragement, advice, or simply a listening ear as they moved through their own adult lives.

Teaching gave me something journalism and law never could have provided: a community of minds, a lifetime of conversations, and the knowledge that my work mattered—not in abstract ways, but in the lives of real people.

This website is an extension of that work. It gathers the materials I created over four decades—novels, short stories, dramas, poetry, etymology lessons, AP units, Great Books frameworks, university lectures—and offers them to anyone who might find them useful. My hope is simple: that these resources continue to spark curiosity, deepen understanding, and maybe even change a life or two.

After all, that’s what teaching did for me.

Start with the literature essays and class notes, including the notes on Dante's Divine Comedy. You can also browse the grammar lessons, articles from Salvo magazine, and resources for students.