What My Life Taught Me About Teaching

What My Life Taught Me About Teaching is not a how-to manual. It is a lived inquiry into how identity, artistry, struggle, and experience quietly shape who we become as educators.

Drawing from a life shaped by movement, instability, music, faith, and reinvention, Dr. Richard A. Fields traces his journey from aspiring classical trumpet performer to K-12 music educator, scholar, and teacher of teachers. Along the way, he confronts the unseen costs of excellence, the fragility of identity built solely on performance, and the profound ways teaching is formed long before we ever step into a classroom.

This book blends memoir, reflection, and pedagogical insight to explore questions many educators carry but rarely name:

What does it cost to pursue excellence in systems not designed with you in mind?

How do lived experiences become teaching practice?

What happens when effort, identity, and ability stop aligning?

And how do care, rigor, and humanity coexist in real classrooms?

Rather than offering prescriptions or frameworks, What My Life Taught Me About Teaching invites readers into moments of formation-childhood transitions, artistic mastery and loss, early teaching failures, and hard-earned growth across urban, suburban, and higher-education contexts. Through these stories, the book reveals how teaching is not merely a technical skill, but an identity shaped through endurance, reflection, and care.

Written for educators, artists, school leaders, and anyone navigating the space between calling and sustainability, this book offers companionship rather than certainty-and clarity rather than easy answers.

This is a book about becoming. Becoming a teacher. Becoming a leader. Becoming human-on purpose.