A Q&A with Assistant Principal Gregory Goble
Riverside assistant principal Gregory Goble worked in schools on the NC coast for years. Then a variety of jobs took him across the country and world. Goble spoke to The Pirates’ Hook in November about his travels, hobbies, interests and joining the Pirate community.
The Pirates’ Hook (PH): Where did you work before joining Riverside?
Gregory Goble (GG): I spent a year and a half in southern Pennsylvania and worked at a middle school. We had chosen Pennsylvania when we moved from Washington State because my mother and sister are in New Jersey and I thought we would try something a little bit closer. [Before that] I was at a high school in Olympia Washington for six years. Had a great experience.
The year before moving to Washington, we were in Texas for a year. I actually took a break from education and worked as an instructional designer for a marine seismic company. I had opportunities to go into the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of Africa, Brazil, in the North Sea off the coast of Norway. I got to work with a lot of amazing people working on these boats, but the oil and gas industry started going a little bit sour. Companies were doing less and less exploratory work. A lot of the content that I was creating was going on a shelf and I wasn’t going out on a boat very often anymore.
PH: Why did you decide to work here?
GG: Fit played a huge role. Riverside was the first school that I had interviewed at, and it was also the school that I felt kind of the most connected to. But what it really came down to for us was a house. Where we were looking was actually east of Durham and where we ended up finding a house was west of Durham. Every place that I had applied for was going to be an hour drive or more than Riverside.
PH: What part of this job are you most passionate about and how will you apply that passion to Riverside?
GG: I’m especially passionate about students receiving equitable opportunities to be successful. [I believe] that all students can learn, it’s just figuring out the best way for them to learn.
The older I get, and the further away we get from COVID, the more I see the need for more understanding and more social development. I don’t think we can do the things the way we’ve done them in the past necessarily. I think we need to think differently about how to address students and the challenges that they face in this world.
Cell phones I think are probably the single biggest challenge. I can’t imagine what my distractibility level would be if I had a cell phone at 16 years old or younger. I don’t think that it would have worked for me. I think that it would have been hazardous to my life completely and I worried about my own kids when they were going through this, but it wasn’t quite smartphone technology and they were mature enough to handle it.
I worry about the amount of time kids spend interfacing with their cell phone rather than interfacing with classmates. You go into one classroom and the kids will all talk to each other and in another class it’s utter silence because they’re all looking at their phone. One feels very different from the other. What kind of communication skills are our students today really going to have when that cell phone has been their go-to?
And the other thing is, nobody’s ever bored. And I’m guilty of this too, I don’t sit and just zone out and think or wonder. I play with my phone and scroll Facebook or something that is not really lending itself to me being a better version of myself. It’s just taking up time and the part that scares me is there are times where I can look at like YouTube shorts or tik tok and I think it’s been 10 minutes and it’s been two hours. It just the time just disappears on me. I just made trouble for myself and I’m an adult. How does that work for a teenager who has greater challenges with time management or more focus?
PH: What’s your favorite thing about working at Riverside?
GG: The same thing that’s my favorite thing about every place I’ve been is the personalities of students and staff. It’s what makes a building.
Seeing the people in this building and the care with which they volunteer their time and energy is inspiring. It’s sometimes challenging to be on the lookout for because we get in our own heads a little bit and we fail to see the very things that we need to see when we need to see them, if that makes sense.
PH: You mentioned you used to be a math teacher for the majority of your career. Do you wish you could still teach?
GG: I do miss teaching and I find other ways to get my fix, whether it’s going into math classes and just helping out, working with math teachers doing collaborating and planning, or tutoring kids that would like to have somebody else say the same thing in a little bit more intimate setting, when I’m afforded those opportunities. They don’t come too often for an administrator because most kids don’t necessarily want to ask an assistant principal to help them with classwork. I wish it wasn’t that way, but it is for the most part.
PH: You played the role of Police Chief in Riverside’s fall play, Clue. What is your history in theater?
GG: I did theater through my childhood and high school, had opportunities to go off to college to pursue theater, and had opportunities to be in some off-Broadway productions. But I instead, went into the military, I started a family, went to school.
When we moved to Texas, we found a little theater Playhouse that we really fell in love with in a small town close to where we were. They had posted something on Facebook [about] open auditions for a comedy called The Fox on the Fairway. I went online and I looked at some of the clips that were online and I was like, ‘this would be awesome.’
So I went and they cast me in the role of Dickey, which is one of the lead roles and probably one of the funniest characters in the show. It was an absolute blast and it made me wonder why I have had not embraced that side of my life in that long. But it mostly comes down to time. You know, as an assistant principal we do athletics in the evening time, not to mention a slew of other things. And so it’s hard to put a full day and then go to a rehearsal.
And the other thing is the older I get, the harder is to memorize my lines. I can’t believe how much I struggled with just memorizing just a few lines. It’s ridiculous.
PH: What kind of impact do you want to have at Riverside?
GG: The impact I’d like to have at Riverside is [being] somebody that can be counted upon to be a good Pirate. Somebody that the students and staff can depend on to get the task completed, regardless of what that task is or how long it will take. To be genuine and approachable, and willing to listen, because this is a hard job and I think it’s gotten exponentially harder over the last handful of years. I worry a little bit about teachers moving forward because it’s hard.
PH: How can you contribute to the community we’ve built here?
GG: I think the best way, and it’s why I was in Clue, is I want to do anything and everything I can to be a part of the culture here. There are a lot of places where I feel like I naturally fit because of my experience, whether it’s theater or ROTC, things along those lines, and a lot of times because this is a big school, I don’t always know what everybody’s doing or what’s going on.
think that if there was something that I wanted teachers to know or students to know is, if there’s room for me, and you’ll have me and I can be included in something or anything, I can support or mentor or sponsor, whatever the case may be. I would love to make myself available.
PH: What are your hopes for the future of Riverside?
GG: There isn’t anything that I want to change about Riverside. I think this is a terrific school and a great place to be.
I love the reputation that Riverside has. I think that there are some things that we all see and we all hear that we all know need to improve. I think it’s coming to a collective to figuring out what we want our identity to be. I don’t believe it’s something that leadership can choose for the school. I’m not even sure that it’s necessarily that the staff can choose because the students and their families are really what make Riverside Riverside, and working and figuring out ways to include students and their families in determining what Riverside is and how Riverside functions from day to day is all of our responsibility.
I wish the families and students had a little bit more of a voice in determining what that looks like. I don’t know how to do it when you’re talking about that many people. But I think we need to increase our efforts with community involvement in helping us make that determination.
Photo by Rory O’Connor
