Mendel Letters 97 — Teacher Man
October 1, 2022
Dear Mendel,
At CCNY in the late 1960s while I was planning to become a revolutionary, you, in your traditional practicality, raised that I needed a backup plan in case there wasn’t a revolution. You suggested teaching, which I thought was an acceptable idea, so I completed my social studies 7–12 teaching certification.
There were no social studies teaching jobs in New York City when I graduated from college in 1971. Teaching offered a draft deferment and because of the war in Vietnam, the teaching ranks were flooded with men who preferred teaching to soldiering. I decided to go to graduate school and avoided the military when the draft law expired and the United States switched to a non-draft volunteer army. At Rutgers I had a teaching assistantship so I had my first chance in front of the classroom as the teacher. I had graduate student-itis and felt compelled to tell students everything that I knew so I must have been incredibly boring.
I did some substitute teaching while I was a graduate student in the early 1970s and I continued to work at the community centers’ summer camp. During the summer of 1974 I decided that I liked teaching much more than dusty libraries and I got a job at IS 292, walking distance from the community center in East New York Brooklyn and my shared apartment.
I started in the fall of 1974 as an everyday substitute teacher and became a regular teacher starting in February 1975. I was assigned to teach seven reading classes to eighth graders who ranged from two to six-years below grade level on standardized tests. I was so unprepared that I think I learned more than they did. Many days I went home in tears from my own inadequacy.
My first mistake was to be too unstructured. I told students they could read anything they wanted to read and could go to the shelves in the back of the room whenever they wanted to find get material. There were two really big problems. First, most of them did not want to read at all, so when given a choice, they simply refused. Second, with permission to get up out of their seats, they just would walk around the room visiting with friends.
I tried to take back the class but then I made my second big mistake. I prepared reading sheets using the blue ink hard to read mimeograph machine. The readings were on eighth grade level, but since they read far belong eighth grade level, and the material was generally unclear, many of the students ripped up the handouts and through them on the floor.
It took me months to establish some structure in class, partly because some of the more disruptive students stopped coming to school, and partly because I finally learned you had to start from where the students were, not from where they were supposed to be.
Years later I was driving through East New York not far from the school and I saw a middle-aged women using a telephone booth — they still had them. I recognized her immediately and even remembered her name. I pulled over and said hello and she even recognized me. She was astounded that I knew who she was and I explained she was part of my first class and I think I remembered all of them. I told her I was sorry I was such a bad teacher, but she said she remembered me as being one of the nice ones.
I now know it takes three to five years to learn how to be a good teacher if you work hard at it. The joke is that some people have thirty years of experience and others have one year of experience thirty times. Unfortunately New York City went bankrupt in 1975 and I was laid-off. I did a lot of different jobs during the next three years including substitute teaching, but I wasn’t able to get back to having my own class until September 1978 when my three-to-five year learning curve started all over again.
Frank McCourt, best known for his Pulitzer Prize winning memoir Angela’s Ashes, wrote a sequel he called Teacher Man. In the book he told stories about his early years as an unprepared teacher at a Staten Island vocational school for young men who were waiting until they were old enough to drop out of school. The movie Blackboard Jungle gives some idea of the school he was describing.
One of his stories was my favorite. On the first day of school, his first day as a teacher, two students were arguing and one threw a bologna sandwich at the other one that landed in the front of the room by Frank. Frank bent over, picked up the sandwich, look at it, considered for a moment, and took a bite out of it. It was delicious. Then an administrator walked in, demanded to know what was going on, and reprimanded Frank for eating in front of the class. Frank apologized for bringing food to class and said it would not happen again. When the administrator left the class erupted in applause because Mr. McCourt had not ratted out the two students who were arguing. Frank McCourt became a much beloved teacher whose students at the Staten Island vocational school always called him Teacher Man.
I’ve been a teacher for five decades and I am very proud to be a Teacher Man and I owe it all to your “backup plan.”
Your son
Hard copies of these typed letters were discovered in an old camp trunk in the basement storage facility of one of the few buildings that remain standing in this Brooklyn neighborhood. The building is quite decrepit and is scheduled for demolition. The letters were found in November 2048 by a teenager who believes they were written by his great-grandfather. The letters are addressed to Mendel, the letter writer’s father, who appears to have been dead for at least six years when his son, whose name we are unsure of, started to write him. The son appears very agitated in some of the letters. With permission from the family, we are publishing them on the date they were written, only 28 years later.
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