Image credit: MSC Photographer

Michael Eby-Good is one of the Art Systems Technicians at McCaskey Campus. He spends most of his day with staff helping to plan out the details of any events, and his last period assisting students in the Stage and Design Production class in the JP Auditorium. Like art does with communities, he acts as a glue, connecting a variety of people.

Fresh out of college in Northern Indiana, Mr. Eby-Good worked as a graphic designer. He only came to Lancaster when his wife did, back in 1989.

Long before working here at McCaskey, he watched his children grow up in the School District of Lancaster. “The kids who go here are a really diverse group,” he said. “I think that in the process of being a McCaskey parent and then a McCaskey employee in particular I’ve gotten a deeper understanding (of students)…I’ve learned a lot.”

Teaching, he mentioned, was never something he intended to do. “I always tell people that my high school experience was better the second time around,” he said. “I just watched Matt Watson (the district’s former go-to tech person) when…we had to teach.”

“I did not enjoy high school very much…I was a nerd, I was a quiet, homebody kid and I think I missed out on a lot…Now I feel like I finally fit in,” he said. “I was a kid with undiagnosed ADHD…and I think at this point, having grown up unmedicated, undiagnosed, I learned to cope with things in the real world. I can do that kind of jumping from one thing to another. This job, the constant need to change, I’m able to cope with it.”

It is these same traits that make him so good at connecting with people now. “I’ve learned a lot about the LGBTQ+ community…through students,” he said. He joked about some of his interactions with students before moving onto his relationships with adults: “Through this job I get to use bits of Spanish when interacting with other staff.”

This connection is exactly how teaching is supposed to be. Students learning from teachers, teachers learning from students, and staff learning from staff, like the students walking in the hallways of the school, dodging each other. Adapting.

“There is no other class like this at McCaskey,” he said of his last period. Much like graphic design, the Stage and Design Production class, who make the sets for all of McCaskey’s theater productions, represents the intersection between math and art, science and imagination.

After interviewing Mr. Eby-Good, I spoke with the class’s other instructor, Ms. Kirchgessner, an art teacher at East. She was looking at the printing press leftover from the recent Newsies production, thinking about the history that was necessary for such a device to be created. She called it magic.

Getting too stuck in the logic can take all the fun out of life. Limit the possibilities. Perhaps it was art that allowed Mr. Eby-Good to get through the difficult times in life and make it to this point now. Art provided a sense of hope.

There will always be times where we feel alone, where we feel like we are the ones adapting to others all the time with nobody taking the time to adapt to us. The good thing is though, that if we are all constantly adapting to each other, that can be used to improve our ability to communicate our own needs.

Michael Eby-Good is an example of how, when you open yourself to others, not only will you learn from them, you will unknowingly teach people along the way.