There's a poem Chad Heltzel wrote more than 15 years ago that almost never saw the light of day. It sat in a dissertation, then in a manuscript, then in a drawer - revised, resubmitted, rejected and nearly abandoned. Last September, it was finally published. The collection, Recording of Dead Languages, arrived quietly, without fanfare, after years of what Heltzel describes with characteristic honesty as "largely failing" to get it out into the world. And then, it was recognized as a finalist for the Society of Midland Authors Award for Poetry.
It's the kind of story that would make a great lesson plan. Which, in a way, it already is.
Heltzel is an English Language Arts teacher at DSST: Aurora Science & Tech High School, where he's spent this year teaching Advanced Placement (AP) and Concurrent Enrollment (CE) courses after his first year with DSST at Cole High School. He came to the classroom carrying something most curriculum maps can't account for: a life shaped by economic hardship, a single-parent household, and the quiet, transformative power of a good education. He was a first-generation college student who eventually earned a PhD in literature. He knows, from the inside, what it feels like to arrive at college-level work without a roadmap, and he knows what it means to have someone hand you one.
"Education was always stressed as important and a way to change my family's economic situation," Heltzel said. "I have always loved reading and writing, and teaching is a way for me to hopefully provide to other students, many of whom are also first-generation, the opportunities available to me so they can feel prepared for college-level English."
That mission is precise and personal. His AP and CE courses focus on demystifying a world that can feel closed off to students who haven't seen it up close. Heltzel wants his students to leave his classroom knowing what a college class feels like, how to navigate its demands, and most importantly, how to trust their own voice on the page. "I hope that my CE and AP classes will give students a feeling for how college-level classes operate, and a place where they can practice and improve those skills so they feel confident, especially in their writing, after they graduate," he said.
The poems in Recording of Dead Languages deal with themes that feel at home in any high school English classroom: the difficulty of making meaning, the ways language shapes and limits us, the interconnectedness of seemingly unrelated events, and the effects of different kinds of loss. These aren't abstract literary concerns. They're the exact questions a teenager is quietly wrestling with when they sit down to write their first college essay, or read a novel that unsettles them, or try to put something true into words for the first time.
What makes Heltzel's story worth telling isn't just that he published a book. It's that he almost didn't, and he's honest about that. He spent nearly two decades submitting, revising, and ultimately preparing to set the collection aside. "After numerous revisions and submissions to contests, I was about to set it aside and move on since I didn't feel close to the poems anymore," he said, "and then the opportunity arose to finally get it published last September." The nomination that followed, he said, "was quite the surprise."
That kind of persistence is exactly what DSST asks of its students. And there's something quietly powerful about a teacher who has lived it, not as a parable, but as his actual life. When Heltzel tells a student that good writing takes time, that rejection is part of the process, that the work is worth doing even when it feels like it's going nowhere, he's not offering a motivational poster. He's offering testimony.
For the students in his classes at AST HS, many of them first-generation college-goers navigating the same uncertain terrain Heltzel once navigated, that testimony matters. It says: this path is hard, and it is possible, and someone who has walked it is standing at the front of the room, ready to walk it with you.
You can purchase Mr. Heltzel's book on Amazon here.