Interview with high school teacher Glen Caruso: transcript

Key points

• Caruso teaches 9th grade English, 12th grade English and British Literature, and Business, Marketing, and Technology 101.
• He has taught about 12 and a half years, including at the University of Georgia, and has been at his current school for about two years.
• He says he is inspired by helping students find their passions and get a running start into adulthood.
• He believes artificial intelligence offers more good than bad, should be embraced, and will be embedded in everything within a few years.
• He is fascinated by how British literature reflects culture, and describes Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as bringing English to the forefront.
• He hopes students will remember him as someone who made a real difference in their lives.

Chapters

1. 0:00Introduction and what inspires a teacher
2. 1:07Teaching experience and why he teaches
3. 2:04Artificial intelligence and education
4. 3:30Love of British literature and Chaucer
5. 4:57The impact he wants to have on students

Full transcript

0:00So, who are you and why are you here? Hey, I'm Glenn Caruso. I'm a teacher at Lake Lure Classical Academy, and I'm here in my English room. I teach English for 9th grade and English and British Literature for 12th grade, as well as Business, Marketing, and Technology 101. What inspires you the most when it comes to that kind of stuff? Well first I love helping students. I love helping students find their passions and helping them direct where they might want to go in their life in terms of what colleges to go to or what trades to go into and ultimately what they may want to do when they get out of school either high school or college. Figuring out what will what jobs will give them a sense of fulfillment, passion, make them money so they can live a good life. And really, I like helping them get off to a running start as they enter adulthood. How long have you been teaching, if you remember?

1:07Sure. I've been teaching about 12 and a half years. I taught on the college level at University of Georgia in Athens. And I also have been teaching here for about the last two years. And I've been teaching journalism, English, and then also digital marketing, marketing technology, and where business is going in the future. What made you want to start teaching? I love helping students. I love mentoring young people. I love helping them understand more about themselves and how it can apply to their future and their future success, both professionally and personally. How do I connect and map a person's unique attributes and skills to potential roles they may want to consider when they get out of school?

2:04What inspires you the most about artificial intelligence? What it can do for education, how it can accelerate how people learn, how it can be a co-pilot for them so that they can think at a higher level. I think there's so much good that artificial intelligence can provide to people. There's also drawbacks. But I think there's more good than bad. And also, I know artificial intelligence and generative artificial intelligence, it's out of the box. So we will be living with it. You can't be scared of it. You have to embrace it. Because it'll be part of our daily lives. To somewhat of an extent, it is already. But within the next three to four years, it will be embedded into everything.

2:55And within the next 10 years, how we do work and business and play will be completely different than how we do it now. I think it offers a tremendous amount of potential for society and for people themselves to think, again, on a higher level and let them use their creativity, human creativity, because artificial intelligence and robots can't duplicate true creativity. What do you like about British literature the most, and how were you introduced to it?

3:30Oh, I was introduced to British literature back in college. I had taken a class 1865 to present. I've read a number of different English authors. I'm fascinated by the different periods, the different literary periods and how it morphed from the time of Chaucer and Beowulf and then Chaucer into the mid-18th and 19th centuries to today and just sort of how it reflects culture, which all writing does, but how it reflects, writing reflects, the society and culture and opinions and thinkings of that particular period.

4:15So it's fascinating to read different authors like Jane Austen or Charlotte Bronte or Oscar Wilde or George Orwell or others, many, many others. Virginia Woolf, and see what their take is on their own lives and what's happening again around them and how they express that in words and how beautifully they express that in words. It's English until really the 13th, until Chaucer in 1390.

4:57English was considered sort of a peasant language. It was French and Latin that people spoke. English would be, have been equivalent to speaking in text, text messages as it is today. Chaucer brought English to the forefront with The Canterbury Tales as the first great novel that was a bestseller across all of Europe. and I think that's fascinating to see how that particular author changed the written word and brought English to the number one language that people were writing in and expressing themselves in, although people express themselves in all different languages. But I think that's sort of fascinating that it all came out of Britain. And then you know there's great authors from every country in every continent, but I have a special interest in Britain and Ireland and European authors in general. What's the biggest impact you want out of teaching a student? I want to make a difference

6:01in their lives. I want to be someone they refer to later in life as Mr. Caruso was one of the biggest influences on my life. He changed my life. He made it better. He helped me understand myself better and what I could do and what I was possible of. He motivated me when other teachers might not have. He cared about me. I want them to remember me that way, that I had an influence on their life and a true impact that made their lives better.

Source and licence

Recording: File:Interview with a Teacher - Glen Caruso.webm by Chase Bohannon , Glen Caruso (2024-12-16), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC0.

The transcript is machine speech-to-text by the TidyTools Audio & video transcriber; the summary, key points and chapters were written by Claude from that transcript. Both may contain errors: check the recording before quoting it.