Chuck Collis

For Chuck Collis, teaching for 28 years was beginning to take its toll. From long hours to the aftermath of online learning, Collis needed a break.

“I hold myself to a really high standard which caused me to put in a lot of hours,” Collis said. “50 to 60 hours a week was usually the norm and I was ready for that to go down.”

Previously the AP Environmental Science teacher at CHS, Collis now works as a biologist for Bayer, a life science and agriculture company, in a division called field solutions. “My team mainly works with testing out seed treatment,” Collis said. He and his team coat seeds like corn and soybeans in a solution that is meant to help them withstand diseases and damage from insects.

“One of the I work on is called seed safety,” Collis said. “The chemicals can be dangerous for the plants themselves, so we do various kinds of germination tests on the seeds.”

Before his decision to leave CHS, Collis found that the educational environment was becoming too exhausting. “I felt like I was wasting my time on things that I didn’t enjoy or things that shouldn’t be necessary,” Collis said. “The whole game of trying to make sure that no one is cheating. I was tired of it. There are already so many aspects of education that feels like this game for points.”

The aspect of grading was not Collis’ favorite. He felt that it encouraged cheating just to get points and didn’t help students learn.

“I’ve never enjoyed grading student writing,” he said. “If I could get away from grading while still being able to hold students feet to the fire, that would have made teaching a lot more enjoyable.” Not only was the grading process beginning to get tedious, but Collis also felt that the district was asking too much of teachers. “It has always been a challenging job, but it felt like every year another responsibility was added,” he said. The accumulation of extra tasks took a toll on Collis; “Everything began to accumulate and it
turned the job into something that it wasn’t 30 years ago.”

Collis feels that teacher mental health has also been overlooked.“We’ve been told any number of times over the last few years to take care of yourself, promote self care,” Collis said. “As far as I could tell it was just people saying that. There was no action taken to actually enforce it.”

Collis has been able to find his passion after leaving education and although he does not plan on returning to teaching, there were many parts of education that he enjoyed, “I liked the creativity of teaching and the freedom that we had at CHS.”