Juggling Careers: From The Circus To The Classroom
by Rebekah Rombom '08
If anyone proves that a career can be fluid and unpredictable, that person
is Jens Larson ’81. Larson, a mathematics major modified with geography
while at the College, wanted to become a city planner during his Dartmouth
days. But during his senior year, the gymnast was invited to join the
circus.
An extremely unconventional move, Larson said he decided to seize the
opportunity to become a performer.
“I worked for this guy that ran the world’s smallest circus,” Larson says.
“It took me to 48 states in about eight months, and we performed everywhere
from Yale University campus to a soup kitchen in Los Angeles…it was a
fascinating introduction to circus, and I started to think about it as
something that was more than just a lark.”
Larson spent two years with that small traveling troupe, then another 17
moving from group to group and selling his act as an independent
contractor.
During the time that Larson was a performer, he was based in Phoenix but “we
were just gone for months at a time,” he says of himself and his wife
Maggie. But injuries forced Larson to seek a more stable lifestyle.
“I managed to live through 19 years, I guess I wasn’t willing to push my
luck any further,” Larson says of his relatively long circus career.
After suffering a lower back injury that made it impossible to do his aerial
act, a knee injury and shoulder problems, Larson began to look into teaching
positions in Phoenix.
“The confidence I needed to enjoy what I was doing was starting to slip,” he
says, “it was starting to get really stressful every day to just get up and do
it, and I didn’t feel like watering down the acts.”
Larson approached the Phoenix public school system about a job substitute
teaching because he had enjoyed the volunteer tutoring he’d done during
off-seasons. To his surprise, Larson was placed in a classroom the next
week because the district had a dire shortage of math teachers. He worked
towards his teaching certification for a year and a half while simultaneously
teaching classes every day.
“It was trial by fire, really,” he says. “It’s extremely
challenging.”
In his current job teaching mostly ninth and tenth grade mathematics, Larson
sometimes tries to incorporate aspects of his circus
days.
“I will perform in class whenever I have what I consider a good rationale
for doing so,” Larson says, but he has learned that teaching and circus variety
acts require very dissimilar types of performing.
“It couldn’t be more different to do the same seven-minute act over and over
again for different people, than what I’m doing now, which is to see the same
kids over and over again for an hour every day. You simply can’t think of
teaching as performing, but you try to make your presentation as interesting as
you can.”
Larson enjoys the opportunity to directly influence his students and the
freedom to control how he runs his own classroom. But in the urban
Phoenix district, it is often difficult to make algebra seem relevant to
students with more pressing problems, he says.
“Teaching is a tremendous challenge, and it won’t be getting any easier as
the years go on,” Larson says. “I suspect that’s because my standards are
going up, my sense of what I need to do to help the kids is going up, and I
have to battle with my expectations on a daily basis.”
Still, Larson finds the work rewarding, if stressful while school is in
session, and says he sees his future as an educator.
“Don’t try to write the script ahead of time,” he says by way of advice for
Dartmouth students, “and be open to the idea that things will sort of fall into
place unexpectedly. This opportunity to join the circus came my way and I
seized it, and I never would have guessed that I would have ended up
teaching. It’s all been great, and if I had tried to write the script
ahead of time I wouldn’t have gotten there.”
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