The World Comes Here

Eric Brandt
    Photo Credit Here

My name is Erik Brandt and I am an English teacher and and IB Diploma coordinator at Harding High School. I do a whole bunch of other stuff but that's my main gig. I was born in North Carolina. I lived in Minnesota Since 1992. I came up here to go to college. I grew up in Southern Wisconsin in the Milt Janes area, and the Beaver Dam area. I came up to Minnesota for college.  I also lived in Scotland for a time. I consider all of that my growing up.

There's a lot of different places I grew up in. I grew up in a small town and so rural that I didn't even know how to cross the street. The people there are largely homogeneous population. Pretty much everyone in my school looked like me, had similar religious background, so a lot of how I grew up didn't actually prepare me for working in a big urban environment where there is so many different kinds of people from different backgrounds. I think growing up rural allowed me to enter a diverse environment without bias. When I student taught at Battle Creek middle school, I felt like I came into it with an open mind. Perhaps I was able to see things more clearly. That environment taught me a lot about how to work with people and to be helpful to all kinds people of different backgrounds.

I lived in Australia for a while. I went there when I was seventeen and I lived there for a year. I wasn't with any family. So I had to kind of find my own way, and that taught me a lot about  being an outsider and being very different. Even though I looked like a lot of the Australians, everybody knew I was an American, and they were not always nice about it.  Some people didn't really like Americans, they took it out on me.  That thought me a lot about trying to to figure out who am I? I feel like that experience  gives me empathy for students who maybe are not apart of the majority group in a school or a classroom or transitioned into a new place.  Those are some of the things that come to mind, in those kind of school year in my life.

Harding High School
  Photo Credit Here.

One of the things I love about working at Harding is, I feel like the world comes to this school. I live in Saint Paul, my wife teaches for Saint Paul schools, my kids go to Saint Paul schools, so there's something we all experience. I loved that in the classes that I had last year, the kids in that room were born on three if not four different continents. Somehow they all found their way here, so the world comes to this place everyday, and that's one thing I find incredibly special. I love that about teaching here, that for me as an English teachers a lot of the things we do is explore perspective, points of view in literature.  I couldn't have asked for a better environment to do so because we have so many who have been through their own life experiences, have their own ways of viewing the world, and have different ways of seeing the work of literature. Where I grew, you read a book like To kill Mockingbird, pretty much everyone is gonna see it pretty much the same way.  Maybe slight differentiation, but not as extreme as someone who grew up in Kenya might read that book very differently from someone who grew up in Minnesota versus Alabama versus Thailand.
In High school, we have to be very disciplined focused. For me as an English teacher, I think the ability to love words is to enjoy reading. If you find a love for reading, and you’re kind of a self starter and you can go find books that interest you, you’ll never be alone. You can always teach yourself anything you want to know. I want kids to be able to leave my classes better writers and better speakers, which boils down to communication. They need to be able to communicate better, and that’s important. To be able to read, read closely. As a teacher I hope to impart some ideas of how to be a good human being, how to be interested in other people, how to share, how to forgive, how to be kind, how to work hard, those things are essential.Similar to parenting, you never quite fully know the influence you have on other people. A lot of students never get the chance, or never do come back and say like “hey, thanks!”
[My role model growing up was] Jeff Wilhelm. He was my 10th grade English teacher, Mr. Wilhelm. I knew from the first moment I met him this person was very gifted and passionate teacher. He wasn’t afraid to talk about anything. He wasn’t afraid to work [the class] to death.  I knew somewhere in the back of my mind as I kind of left 10th grade that maybe I want to be an English teacher and if I ever become an English teacher I want to be like Wilhelm. So, I’ve tried. And failed. Ever since. But I keep trying

There are people above us teachers at Harding. They are the district administration, who are good people, trying to do good things and have a good mission. But they implement things in such a broad way. They make decisions that really mess up our lives here [in Saint Paul Public Schools]. The district administrators make it very difficult to manage school. They have to view everything and make decisions from the atmosphere, while I’m down on the ground. For example, there has to be consequences for student’s antisocial and negative behaviors in schools. Years ago, there was kind of a zero-tolerance approach, if students did anything wrong they were suspended and kicked out. That’s not good. That was not a good system. But then the last couple of years we went to the opposite, where there were virtually no consequences for any bad behaviors. It just makes schools crazy. Realizing that, now our district is trying to work back to our tier, and that kind of stuff drives teachers out of their professions. They feel like they’re not safe, the building is uncontrollable and they feel like they’re not being listened to. That stuff is a major frustration. There’s a big city page article, a local arts paper last May. Several of us [Saint Paul Public Schools teachers] spoke out against the school district, which was fairly a dangerous thing to do. But we teachers did it,  it was a pretty big and it made some waves. Last year was kind of crazy. There were just kids swearing at you as a teacher and there’s nothing you can do cause there’s no consequences. It’s demoralizing.
Another thing that is just generally frustrating is just when the system is set up in a way to not really value human beings. At Harding, we just have so many kids. We have too many kids in this building that not everybody can sit down at lunch time. That’s not truly valuing them as human beings. We have a lot of kids with trauma and sadness and we don’t have enough counselors. We have an amazing counselor team [here at Harding] but they can’t see everybody. Or when a kid’s acting out in school, they’re probably acting out for a reason. Are they hungry? Are they homeless? Can they not read?  So we have punishments for them but we don’t have anything that restores them, to really sit down with the parent, the kid, the teachers. To do that requires time and money. It’s frustrating when we know there’s answers that work but can’t implement them.

Photo Credit Here 

[What qualifies someone as a Minnesotan?] I think the ability to endure a really long cold winter. Winter drives so many people away. [A barrier I had to overcome was,] I really had to learn to love winter. Like, 3M has one of their headquarters not very far from here at all, and one thing they recently stopped doing was trying to hire people outside of Minnesota. They still will but they used to search all over the world and they would bring people here and pay them really well. Those people would  be here for like one winter and they would move away. 3M realized, “we need to build, grow our own town at home, because the climate.” The climate would drive people away. So for me, learning to embrace winter was something I honestly had to overcome. Just buy some snow pants, get a good winter coat, go outside, build forts with my kids, go cross country skiing. It’s just kind of like, winter’s long, February and March I get a little depressed, but I’m gonna see it through. It sounds trivial but it’s not.

I think Minnesotans in general, politically are more progressive, are left leaning politically. I think Minnesota is a hotbed for NGOs like Non-Government Organizations that do a lot of relief and charity work. There’s a reason for that, because there’s a progressive mindset here out of the deep Scandinavian tradition. Because there’s a lot of organizations that serve people in need around the world and bring people here and because we are a welcoming place, and that’s part of the Minnesota identity. Not perfect but I think welcoming. I still feel like an outsider. Even though, you know one might look at me and assume like oh he looks like someone from the northern Midwest, he must be a Minnesotan. I’ve encountered other people from other parts of the United States, [that say,] “Oh Wisconsin Minnesota what’s the difference?” Well there’s a difference.  Those are very different ways of approaching the world and thinking about the world, those two cultures. I mean I live here but it feels like home but not totally home.

In the world of me as a teacher, I think I’ve had some different experiences. I went to a rural public school from grades K through eight, and I went to a private boarding school for high school, then I lived in Australia and ended high school there. Then I came up here, went to Macalester College, then I went to go live in Scotland for a year. A few years ago I did a full ride teachers exchange to Hungary, I taught a net-culture as well. There’s a lot of other places in the world that I want to explore and live in and be with. But one thing I notice here, teaching at Harding, is that most teachers have grown up here, went to schools not too far from here and have a really kind of pre-ventral view of the world. Their world is kind of “the twin cities,” That’s their whole life, their whole family. They don’t have a lot of perspectives of what things are elsewhere. I feel like I have a lot of different perspectives than a lot of people. It’s annoying to other people sometimes cause I’m always bringing up ways of seeing things and doing things. Having many perspectives is definitely a gift. It becomes an addiction cause I want to live and travel in South America...Eastern Africa...Japan...So, I'm always wondering, "what's the next place?"

Footnotes:

1.International Baccalaureate (Source)

2. 3M Company (Source)

3. Non-governmental organization NGO (Source)

Story Facilitators: Mao Vue, Matt Bartholomew, Nasro Mohamed