All Over the Place: The Seymour Brownstein Most Improved Student Award

From My Teaching Book

By Michael H. Brownstein

More than two dozen years ago, my father, Seymour Brownstein, passed away. He was a hardworking individual who established in his children the same principles and values that he himself followed. I remember discussions with him about a number of issues—corporate welfare; the necessity of a good education; the need to be a good reader; how the poor are not poor because of weak character traits, but because of circumstances oftentimes beyond their control; and when you try as hard as you can, many times it is as gratifying as winning.
    I remember one cold Thanksgiving. He had a bad cold. I was entered in a turkey trot—a ten-kilometer run, if I remember correctly. It was a dismal day, cloudy and gray, the landscape windswept. I ran and didn’t win. He wrote a poem about it. I believe I came in fourteenth. It didn’t matter. The fact that he thought enough to memorialize the event in a poem was enough for me. The fact that he was always there watching, at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end was more than enough.
    Today the 8th graders graduate from my school. With the help of family members, I have raised the price of the prize to seventy-five dollars. I’m giving it to a young lady who last year followed the wrong crowds from one negative incident to another. She wasn’t a child who could not do the schoolwork; she was a child who didn’t care to do the work. What a difference a year makes.
    Today I am going to give her the seventy-five dollar prize because she is no longer a follower. Today she is beginning to be a leader. I’m going to say to the audience:

I’m just a school teacher, so you know I don’t have a whole lot of money, but I’m going to make an almost promise. An almost promise is when you promise to try to do something to the best of your ability no matter how hard it is to do. If—no, no, if’s the wrong word. When—a much better word—the winner of the Annual Seymour Brownstein Most Improved Students Award gets through high school with adequate grades—we’ll say a B- or better—and when she makes it through high school and doesn’t have a baby, I’ll do everything in my power to make sure she gets into college and gets a scholarship—how about if we name it the Seymour Brownstein College Scholarship.

    I’ll say some other things, too. I’ll talk about peer pressure and following and negative choices. I’ll talk about how great it is to see a young lady blossom in the 8th grade to become a positive leader. Then I’ll call my mother, Lynn Brownstein, to the stage and let her give the envelope to the winner.
    This is the way life should be. A reward to someone who epitomizes exactly everything my father taught me when he was alive. There is always room for improvement. We must always make room for it.

Copyright © 2022 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.