From the Recesses – Do You See It?

Regular readers of this magazine likely know that I spent 13 years teaching high school in Brooklyn, NY, before moving to Antigua. They also probably know that shortly after arriving here I’d generated an enormous bar tab, and had to put myself into indentured servitude in the mezcal bar of Café No Sé to try and pay it off. And I’d be willing to bet that, over the years, a number of you have heard me joke that the two jobs require remarkably similar skill sets, because in both positions you have to know when to let the kids run a bit wild and have a good time, but also how to pull back on the reins when everything starts to go pear-shaped and sideways. And in either a Brooklyn classroom or a dark Guatemala bar, you often feel like you should be armed.

Any number of times down here, across the bar and in quieter conversations, I’ve been asked why I became a teacher. And I’ve been thinking about it lately as I approach the 20th anniversary of my first time in front of a classroom. The simple answer is: Mr. Burns, my high school Shakespeare teacher. The more dramatic answer is a retelling of the time when Mr. Burns first cracked my thick skull open with a particularly deft bit of magical compassion and saw some light shining through.

My hometown, Binghamton, NY, is a small city, so it’s no surprise that Mr. Burns, aside from being my teacher, was also a family friend, and one who lived a remarkable, adventurous life: World War II veteran, businessman, mayor of our hometown, friend to Bobby Kennedy, poet, painter, advocate for the mentally ill. And in his late fifties, wanting for a new kick, he became an English teacher at our local high school. By the time I had him as a teacher he’d been there for ten years or so, yet he still loved teaching and had passion for the job. Years later, as I watched fellow teachers flame-out within months, I came to understand how rare such a long-burning fire in the belly really is.

Teaching is a very hard job. It’s rewarding if you’re doing it right, but still it’s a job that carries lousy pay, crazily early mornings (what other job expects you to be at your desk and to function with a group of sullen teenagers at 7:15?), constant late-night headaches of paperwork and lesson planning, the more-than-occasional sociopathic colleague, the incessant ridiculum of office politics and a hierarchy of superiors, many of whom chose a path in administration when they discovered that they hated children.

There’s no getting around those realities, so if a teacher is going to keep their drive and their passion, they’ve got to have something else to spin their jets. Mr. Burns had it, and he inspired it in me.

It wasn’t until my senior year that I finally got Mr. Burns as a teacher. He was running an elective on Shakespeare and I wanted in. The word in the halls was that Mr. Burns was cool, and also that he was “an easy A.” Moreover, I’d been doing some acting in the school’s Shakespeare Club for a few years — as were many of my artsy, intellectual, adventurous and chemically-altered friends. At the time I wasn’t a bad kid, just kinda wayward, and if Shakespeare was a way to hang around after class with my friends, then fantastic! Bring on the Bard.

I remember digging school for the social scene, but academically . . . I just didn’t really care. I didn’t see much of a point, and I had a solid low-70s average to prove it. If the teacher was cool, I’d have fun and maybe learn a little bit. If the teacher was a jerk,  then I’d block away incoming information like the Karate Kid. I took the entire academic experience without much concern. It was all, “much ado about nothing,” as far as I could tell.

But from the start, Mr. Burns’ class was different. With Bill, as I came to know him in the last few years of his life, there was utterly no sense of authority — which made it flat-out impossible to rebel against him. He treated his students with civility and decency (though he did possess a wicked “teacher’s glare” if you did anything mean-spirited). This method worked wonders with me, to the point where I took it upon myself to be his friend and ally in class if things started to get too far out of hand.

Our three big works that semester were Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet and Lear. In class we would sometimes read aloud for a few minutes. On Fridays we’d do something distantly akin to acting. Most nights we had a few pages to read, but the course didn’t hurt the brain and you could get away without studying much text. There was never a sense of great pressure, and at least half of the time in class we’d just talk about stuff. More often than not Mr. Burns would start class by telling a story about his family, often about his wife, Ellen, or their children, one of whom lived in the State Hospital up on the hill, institutionalized for most of his adult life as a schizophrenic. Or he’d ask us about love. In particular I remember the day that Bill asked whom amongst us believed in love at first sight. My girlfriend at the time, Karla, and I looked at one another and our hands shot straight up. Bill loved Karla and me, and when he saw us sitting in the back row with our hands reaching for the sky, he smiled and told us about when he first laid eyes on sweet Ellen.

There were some deeper, maybe darker, classes, too, spent discussing the cruelty of Fate or God or Chance. Or even if there was a God, and if so, how He could he treat His own creation with such heightened disregard. We spoke about what children should expect from their parents and what they owe in return. Then there was the class when Mr. Burns spoke of the bonds that can exist between the young and the very old — and personally, I like to think that he slipped that one in there just for Karla and me. I’d enjoyed these conversations thoroughly and obviously saw that there was some overlap between our talks and our text, but up until the day that I walked into class to find Mr. Burns staring out the window overlooking Oak Street, nothing much of it had really sunk in. Still, in his class, I was afforded the opportunity to speak and to be listened to. In return I got to share in Bill’s particular wisdom and Karla’s natural and deeply human insight. And even to gain some valuable fodder for deeper thinking through classmates’ comments from time to time.

But what seemed back then to be conversations designed for their ease, I came to understand as Bill’s pre-surgical prep for the time that he’d bust my head open in a way that I simply couldn’t have understood before the windowsill and the momentary madness that followed.