James Black grew up in Island Lake, Illinois, near the Wisconsin border, the son of driven parents who valued literature, academics, and hard work. His father studied aerospace engineering at Iowa State, had ideas about NASA and rockets, and ended up at Sears Corporate — but whatever he did, he did it without apparent difficulty. His grandfather on that side kept a library in the basement stocked with science fiction. His mother also went to Iowa State, where she and his father met while she was studying veterinary science, a field that she still works in to this day. She read constantly, and could often be seen with a Stephen King book in her hands. Books were simply part of the air in that house.

He became a latchkey kid — home after school, door locked, chores and homework, dinner on his own if needed. Self-starting was the expectation. He carried it all the way to Japan and had to have it humbled out of him.

After graduating from Wauconda High School and earning his English education degree at Western Illinois University, James taught at a few Illinois schools, grew restless near Chicago, and eventually accepted a position at an eikaiwa in Yamaguchi Prefecture — a rural, quiet corner of Japan about as far from Tokyo as you can get. An eikaiwa is not a public school; it's an after-school English prep program people choose to attend. His students ranged from infants whose mothers brought them for early exposure, to exam-anxious middle schoolers, to a businessman who traveled to the US for work and needed to sharpen his professional English, to an elderly social group who came mainly to talk with a native speaker, to a young guy in his early 20s who was shy and a little awkward and deeply, seriously into Bring Me the Horizon. "He asked really interesting, strange questions," James said. "He was one of my favorites."

The plan was for one year. Maybe use Japan as a launching point for traveling around Asia. He stayed four. Then COVID closed Japan's borders to non-natives, travel became impossible, and eventually he came back. He'd also learned something he hadn't expected to learn: "I learned to be more dependent on other people." The pivot came at a doctor's office, when he needed his boss's wife to explain his stomach situation to a physician because he didn't speak the language. "There's nothing more humbling than that," he said. He came home more willing to ask for help, more willing to work with others — qualities that have served him well in the teaming model at Macomb Middle School, where he's now in his fourth year teaching English.

He chose Macomb deliberately. He had good memories of WIU, liked the scale of the community, hated suburban traffic, and felt at home in a quieter place. "I like the nature aspect of things," he said. The rural Japan he'd lived in had felt right to him for the same reasons.

In his classroom, he's trying to build something that takes time: students who actually want to read. He partnered this year with librarian Mrs. White on her million-word reading challenge, aligning his own independent reading push with her initiative. Every quarter, students choose their own book — with some guidance. He vets their choices; Dogman, for the five-thousandth time, doesn't make the cut. He knows his students' interests within a month, runs interest surveys, and studies their writing. By second quarter, he said, he's started to see it shift — students talking to each other about what they're reading, asking him and other English teachers for recommendations. "It takes change," he said. That's not nothing.

He's currently teaching Brown Girl Dreaming, Jacqueline Woodson's memoir told entirely in verse — which some students love and some resist, because the figurative language doesn't yield a clean Google answer. He's noticed a tendency in recent students to expect direct answers and to get frustrated when AI doesn't provide them immediately. His response is deliberate: "The answers are in there. I'm not going to give you the answer every single time. I'll show you where. But you have to find it." He makes a related point about AI itself: the people who use it best are the ones who read well enough to write a good prompt and critically enough to know when the output is wrong. Literacy isn't in competition with technology. It's what makes technology useful.

The humanities-versus-STEM tension comes up. He doesn't think the emphasis on STEM is wrong. But: "it's important that we also remember the artistic side, the human side of everything that we do. To forget those things — and just focus on the ones and zeros — is losing a bit of ourselves."

There's one more dimension to James Black's presence at Macomb Middle School that he named plainly. The history teachers here are all male; English teachers tend to be women. He's aware that young men — especially in a rural area — can come to see the humanities as something that doesn't belong to them. He's trying to be a counterweight to that. "Young men do need a younger male figure who is more open to that humanity side of things," he said. Someone who models comfort with the arts and doesn't apologize for it.

He thinks about his parents, both of whom worked hard to instill their values of literature and education into their children. He, in turn, strives to extend those values into the lives of his own students. Just as these values have served to enrich his life and provide him with a myriad of experiences, he hopes that they too will allow his students to experience the opportunities that literature and education can open doors to.