All Over the Place: Why I Teach

At the start
of a new school year

By Michael H. Brownstein

I never went to war. Korea ended a year before I was born, and we lost the war in Viet Nam the year I began college. I never had the hard, comfortable friendships true battle inspires, and I never had comrades passionate enough to link into that all-purpose male code – one man laying his life down for another. No, not me. I never had that.
    But fake wars? That’s another story. The war on drugs, for instance. I was on the front lines, a war that threw so much money at itself, it imploded – filling prisons and creating cottage industries for curriculum products for every school and community in the nation. It never ends. Just one more victim and one more prisoner and one more person I know who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, each of their lives sent spiraling downwards so quickly, the very system that wants to help them ties them into so many knots, it cannot.

    I fought in the war against poverty – still do, in fact – and I know that this war too can never be won. We need poverty for the jobs it gives to us and for the cheap labor and for the gooey Hallmark Christmas stories.
    There have been other fake wars in my lifetime. Some were firecracker fads, some burnt themselves out under their own weight, and others were so ignored they just vanished and no one remembers.
    The good in fake wars is that your nightmares are never bloody. You don’t wake suddenly in a cold sweat. You never scream out in the middle of the night. At no time do you suddenly slip into a foxhole and find yourself crawling over bodies and pieces of bodies to get away. The participants of fake wars come and go as their interests dictate, not like soldiers who are stationed somewhere waiting for the boredom to become one huge surge of adrenaline, providing them enough material for nightmares for life. No, most fake warriors are never made to stay. Some are in it for a week, some a month, some a year or two. Others make it their life – but they are rare. They become emergency room doctors. Inner city cops. Undercover narcotic operatives.

I became a teacher.
    I am not talking about a two-year teacher either – two years in, a bestselling book, author signings, TV talk shows. Nor am I talking about teachers who become teachers because teaching is all they felt they could do. Teaching for a paycheck, in other words. Then there are those who start in the classroom because all they really want is the most direct way to a desk in the board offices. They should have applied there to begin with. Teaching is not about money. It is about passion. I became a teacher because teaching is what I needed to do. The fact that they paid me to do it made it all that much better. Not too many people can say they get paid for their hobby.
    I can.

    I can also claim to have had some of the most incredibly satisfying moments in my life teaching school, some of the most inspiring, and there were times I had to walk away so I could shed tears in private. I have lost students to drugs and violence. I have seen students falter to mental illness and devastating sickness. And I have seen students become successful members of the community. One student, for instance, came back to see me ten years after he graduated from my eighth-grade class. “Did you apply for this grant?” he asked, handing me a half-dozen sheets of paper. I told him I had not. It was just too much work for a thousand dollars. “Mr. Brownstein,” he answered, “I’m in charge. Whatever you need, whatever ideas you want to use, let me know. I’ll make sure all of them get funded.” I wrote the grants over the next few days – ten in all – and he kept his word. The school received ten thousand dollars. We still keep in touch. He has moved up in his foundation, and I am proud of him, but I cannot forget how we had talked about him in the teacher’s lounge and worried he would not make it past the age of sixteen – his mother a drug addict, his brother a drug addict, his grandmother lost to poverty’s skirmishes.
    He was one student I reached. There were many more, I am sure. But there are those I did not. When one of my science fair stars left for high school, she called me monthly for help and I offered it to her. Then she disappeared. I did not know why. A year later she came by the school with her newborn son, but she did not try to see me. She was too ashamed. I wish I had known this. I would have made her welcome. I would have told her I was still in her corner. I would have pushed her to stay in school and continue towards her goal to be a scientist. That was the last any teacher saw of her. I went to her house, but she no longer lived there.
    I lost others too, to prison and gangs, alcohol and drugs – victims who could win individual battles, but not the war. Once on a subway I came upon five of my former students robbing a man. They stopped when they saw me, gave him back his possessions at my request, and apologized because I asked that of them. It gave me a nice feeling, but it saddened me more – I never went into education to educate children to become lifelong learners of crime.

I have taught in the front lines for more than thirty-five years. I have published personal views and curriculum ideas and have had articles rejected by editors because they thought they were works of fiction. I have taught in the inner city of Chicago. I have never been in a school that did not have less than ninety-six percent of its population eligible for the federal free-lunch program. I have taught in schools where I had to check the girl’s bathroom to make sure no men were hiding there, and in schools without bathroom doors, so no one could think of hiding.
    One time I entered my classroom to discover a classroom of weapons. Almost every child had something on their desk – a thick stick, a piece of metal, rocks, one kitchen knife. “What’s going on?” I asked and was reminded that today was the day a student was transferring into our room from another class, his ten-day suspension over. My class was scared. They knew his reputation. He was dangerous; he hurt people. They reminded me how two weeks earlier he had grabbed some boys and held them hostage in the bathroom. This was before zero tolerance, before every school spent money on security, a time when a touch on a child’s shoulder meant good work and it was OK to hug. Somehow, I was the teacher who managed to reach out to the suspended student, calm his hostages, calm him, and settle the matter with no one getting hurt. After a few weeks, I knew he really wasn’t a bully; he was just a victim in need of nurturing. When we in the school changed the way we dealt with him, he began the slow process of healing. At school’s end, he made a few good friends.

There were others like him. Too many to count. There was the girl who was raped by an uncle and withdrew so far into herself, she still has not fully healed. There was the boy who couldn’t stand his mother being beaten all of the time and took his anger out on the younger students. There was the teenager who got a summer job so he could go to college, only to have his stepfather steal his earnings to buy whisky. I became a part of these children. I made sure the girl was safe. It took newspaper articles and police, but it was done. I made sure the boy’s mother was no longer beaten. I went to his home after school one Thursday and she answered the door with a bleeding lip, a skewed nose, one eye swollen shut. I had come to ask for assistance with her son, but that matter fell to the wayside. “How do you pick a man?” she asked. How did I know the answer? But I knew where she could get help. I knew where she could get counseling. I knew where she could learn how to rebuild her family and her own self-esteem. I was able to offer her that, and I did. By the end of the year, he no longer bullied little children. He became a classroom superstar. And I went into the housing project and into the apartment of the stepfather who had stolen the money for liquor. I asked everyone to leave the room so he and I could talk privately. What was I thinking? He was bigger and he was stronger, but I was right. I told him we would solve the problem now – however he wanted. It did not make a difference to me. He gave the money back and I kept it for the remainder of the summer for safekeeping.
    I will not leave my place in the trenches. I will continue to fight the best way I can – thirty-five years and counting – winning battles and losing battles, and I will never go down for lack of trying. I refuse to give up on this war. I figure I have at least twenty more years to give.

Copyright © 2020 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s volumes of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else and How Do We Create Love?, were published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018 & 2019, respectively.