By Luke Baynes

They say it’s never too late to learn, but Reuben Jackson is proof that it’s never too late to teach.

At 54 years old, Jackson is the newest addition to the English department at Burlington High School. It’s his first full-time teaching job.

“I think I was pretty composed,” Jackson said after his first day on the job. “You always get a little jittery, because you want to do well, but I guess you get to a point in life too where you just do your best.”

Jackson was born in Augusta, Ga., but grew up in Washington, D.C. He graduated from Plainfield, Vt.-based Goddard College in 1978, and did his student teaching in East Montpelier. He tried to find a permanent teaching job in Vermont after graduation, but America was in the midst of a recession, so he moved back to Washington, where he earned a master’s degree in library sciences from The Catholic University of America.

Although teaching was always hovering in the back of his mind, Jackson spent the 1980s working as an assistant librarian at the African Art Museum and as a children’s librarian for District of Columbia Public Schools. In 1989, he landed a full-time job at the Smithsonian Institution, working as an archivist with the Duke Ellington Collection, the world’s most comprehensive archive of jazz’s greatest composer.

A lifelong jazz buff, Jackson recalled spending his lunch hours staring at the display containing the tenor saxophone of the “eternally modern” Lester Young, to the point at which a suspicious security guard asked him what he was doing there day after day. “Do you know what came out of that horn?” he asked the puzzled guard.

His job allowed him to meet such jazz luminaries as Wynton Marsalis, Tony Bennett and Quincy Jones. On one occasion he even ran into Michael Jackson in the hallway. “The girl I loved most in eighth grade jilted me, because she liked you better,” Jackson told his more famous namesake. The King of Pop just laughed and politely apologized in his delicate falsetto voice.

Ten years into his career at the Smithsonian, he began “scratching the itch” to teach by doing after-school work at D.C.-area middle schools three days a week.

“You’re a teacher with a museum job,” he recalled an astute friend telling him during that dualistic period of his life. “It was like someone cleared your windshield for you,” Jackson remembered. “I could see that I was very split.”

When he was offered early retirement from the Smithsonian in 2009, he took it. More than 30 years after his futile job search in Vermont, he began his quest anew, again during a period of economic recession.

“I never really wanted to leave (Vermont),” he said.

Jackson will teach 10^th and 11^th grade English this year at Burlington High. The first book in his American literature class will be John Knowles’ 1959 coming-of-age classic “A Separate Peace.” In light of the statewide destruction caused by Tropical Storm Irene, he also hopes to incorporate a section on various forms of flood literature.

“One of the points is to show that literature is topical,” Jackson said. “It’s not just something that we foist upon kids.”

A former poet-in-residence in Howard County, Md. and a contributor to the jazz-oriented Down Beat magazine, Jackson would like to use those experiences to introduce music into his curriculum in a manner similar to a workshop he taught for the Young Writers Project, in which he had students try to express the emotions of instrumental compositions in words.

“If we’ve been lucky, we’ve had teachers who’ve had an impact,” Jackson related, in an attempt to describe why he wants to teach. He recalled a teacher who learned of his interest in jazz and changed his life by giving him a long-playing record to take home of alto saxophonist Charlie Parker’s legendary 1947 bebop sides for Dial Records.

“This is terrible cliché – that teaching is learning – but it is,” he said. “It makes me a more engaged person. I get a lot of energy from kids. I learn so much about humanity.”

“I’m very calm in three places,” Jackson continued. “I love being in the mountains, I love being in a radio studio and I love being in the classroom. (Teaching) matters. It matters a great deal.”