lessons to inspire the educator

Benjy Fenske has had quite a career as an educator.

He spent 11 years at the Pierce City school district, 10 as a coach, and 23 years in Clever, where he retired in June 2022 as superintendent, after previously serving as a building administrator.

What made the journey meaningful were the stories Fenske collected. Now he has assembled some of them into a book: Unscripted and Undeniable: Unforgettable Tales from a Teacher, Coach and Administrator.

“I started off just wanting to write a manuscript so that my kids would have a record of my experiences,” Fenske said. “This was just going to be a collection, but I found all the stories had a moral. As I thought about it, everything that happens to me in life is an aggregate. It makes up the person that I am. I learned everything happens for a reason. You need to learn from everything that happens to you. If you don’t, you’ve wasted an opportunity.”

Story by Murray Bishoff

Benjy Fenske collects his years of education experience into his new book Unscripted and Undeniable: Unforgettable Tales from a Teacher, Coach and Administrator.

Fenske’s book has four parts in eight chapters: stories of family and other jobs beyond education, stories of a teacher, coaching stories and administrator stories. The package was published by Streamline Books and is available on Amazon. His editor completed the book by contacting people in Fenske’s “distant and not-so-distant” past for quotes that intersect the stories.

“The best story in the book is about a young man I was teaching,” Fenske said. “I was getting ready to take kids to a business contest at a local university. I needed to take seven kids. Picking the first six was easy. I couldn’t decided between two for the last position. I asked the kids if we could flip a coin, and that chose the final team member, a sophomore. At contest, that kid got so into business that he turned in the top individual score. We had a strong team and mowed through the competition that day.

“After that, I couldn’t turn him off. He had an excitement never shown before. He was the only kid I ever taught who completed my entire accounting curriculum. I created a class for him. After he graduated from Pierce City High School, he got a business degree at Texas A&M, and an MBA at the University of Missouri. Today he manages $10 billion in assets at a firm in Dallas. He reached out to me a few years ago. We reminisced about flipping the coin.

“You have to give kids a chance. You never know where they will take it.”

The funniest story in the book came from a girls basketball game Fenske coached where his team was losing badly. Coming down to the last minutes of the game, with the outcome certain, one of the referees commented to Fenske, “They say you should guard the person who’s hurting you the worst.” So Fenske put his best defender on the other referee. For the final minutes, she guarded him closely, even kept him from breaking away.

“I thought for sure he was going to call a technical foul on us, but he didn’t,” Fenske recalled with a smile. “The other referee was dying laughing. After the game, one of my supervisors came up and asked me, ‘Did he score?’ People still ask me about that. They don’t believe it.

“That’s the thing about this book. It is not a storybook. It’s a book of stories, based on fact. It’s amazing that all these things happened to one person, and they’re all true.”

Trying moments often made Fenske’s best stories. His first year as a superintendent turned into a nightmare. The school district was hit by ransomware in November. While systems came back online by Christmas, in January Fenske became ill and ended up in the hospital, where he watched the Kansas City Chiefs defeat the 49ers. Then COVID hit. It was the perpetual “If it’s not one thing, it’s another.”

Unexpected experiences occurred along the way. Fenske’s assistant coach in Pierce City turned out to be his wife.

“Fate was involved in that one,” he recalled. “Cindy applied for a job elsewhere, and someone from Pierce City took that job. So she looked into the position being vacated in Pierce City and got that job. We were married five years later.”

She tells the story in an afterword in the book. Initially she heard the person hired was from “Prairie City,” but could never find such a town in Missouri. Pierce City was the closest thing, so she went there, and oddly enough found the local administrators were expecting someone to come for an interview that day. She waded through a variety of seemingly irrelevant questions to her teaching skills, such as her religion, political party, whether she owned horses and could she coach. She wrote, “I guess I answered all of those correctly — I was hired on the spot.”

Fenske found that kind of story consistent with his experience.

“Life is so happenstance sometimes,” he said. “I think you have to have a consistency of purpose, a ‘This is the way it needs to be done.’ At the end of the day, you have to think, ‘I did the best job I could, despite what others might think.’

“My message to educators is: Stay the course. Educators are great people who sacrifice a lot. You need to work hard and make the world better one kid at a time.”

Sometimes a defeat turned into a better learning experience. One chapter tells of the time Fenske, as a new Future Business Leaders of America sponsor, took a group of Future Farmers of America students versed in Robert’s Rules of Order to a parliamentary procedure contest. They made their presentation before a 90-year-old judge from the local Parliamentarians Club. After running through their mock “meeting,” the older judge observed, “You boys are a bunch of Aggies, aren’t you? I could tell by how often you used your gavel. You used it more times than a carpenter uses a hammer.” The evaluation went downhill from there as she made point after point where the proper procedure was not followed.

Fenske apologized to his team afterwards for not better preparing them for such a grueling exam. Then they proceeded to console him, saying they would be better after that. All five went on to professional careers, two taking state and national FFA offices. None of them forgot that day.

Some of Fenske’s stories put the spotlight on colleagues, and some on himself. His practical jokes chapter came with a caution that some gags can go too far, and he tried to never leave bad feelings. His final chapter ruminated over an eighth graduation ceremony in Pierce City where a student wore a “We Don’t Need No Education” T-shirt derived from the Pink Floyd song that got under Fenske’s skin. He recalled that situation on several occasions when he moved on as an administrator in Clever. He proudly recalled that his insistence of a formal dress code for ceremonies helped inspire a new pride, not only among students but also among family members. Again, a bad situation could be turned into a positive one.

He ends the book with 34 bullet-point lessons he learned through his career.

In his writing strategy, Fenske chose not to mention anyone’s name.

“Read the book, if you were there, you would know,” he said. “I wanted to protect the innocent and the guilty. In some stories, I wanted to protect them. Those who recognize themselves will be honored.”

Fenske said he’s been asked to write another book. He’s considering it.

“I have 36 stories in this book. I’ve got hundreds more.”

In the meantime Fenske has not finished with education. Though retired from K-12 education, today Fenske works with the University of Missouri as part of the Network of Educator Effectiveness, helping to train principals and superintendents on properly evaluating teacher effectiveness.

He also wants fellow educators to learn, as he did, from experience.

“I learned that I’ve been surrounded by a lot of really good people, my co-workers, students and players,” he said. “If I had no other experience than that one kid who became excited through a coin toss that led to a successful career, I would have been a success. I’ve been blessed to have had so much more.” n

Previously in Keeping Secrets, 15-year-old Paige learns that her mom, Alice, is a spy and that her dad has been kidnapped by Alice’s rogue boss, Piper. In a chase that has lasted all night long Paige’s dad is freed but now Alice and Paige have been apprehended by unknown men. To make matters worse, Brayden, the boy from school who’d helped Paige and Alice has been taken too.