FUCK OFF AND DON'T TRUST THIS BLOG (Part 3)
Bio Part 3
The room they interviewed me in was a small dingy office with peeling white paint. There were wires poking out of one of the walls where a loudspeaker was supposed to be. One wall had a big white board with educational jargon scribbled on it. The principal's office was lit by faded white sterile light typical of an old lab. There were no windows.
The interview had been going fine. The principal had been asking typical teacher questions that I felt I had been answering with a moderate degree of confidence. What was my grading policy - I based it off of four points. What was the basis of my P.E. curriculum - I followed a sport education curriculum with adventure ed sprinkled in. How did you manage students with poor behavior - I punched them in the face - kidding! I’m kidding. The questions were all things I had practiced for at college with my classmates.
But then he asked a question that caught me by surprise. “What makes you think you can teach our kids?” There was no bullshit jargon around the question. No, “how do you adjust your pedagogy for students from lower socio-economic status?” Nope. Here was a black man asking a whiter than white bread kid from Connecticut with zero inner-city experience how he planned on connecting with black and hispanic students.
The question made me uncomfortable, and I took a moment to think about it. What was the right answer here - how do I not fuck this up? I eventually settled on the closest version of the truth I could find for myself. I shrugged and said, “Kids are kids, regardless of who you are, if they see you putting in effort they’ll respond to it.” He smiled and shook my hand.
Now as much as I’d like to say my fast wit and rugged honesty won me the job, I also have the ability to put two and two together. The school was interviewing me in late August and I didn’t see anybody else lining up outside the door for the interview. Their former P.E. teacher must have quit with very late notice. Any warm body with opposable thumbs and a NYS physical education certification probably would have won the job. Probably no one wanted the job. But hell, I had burnt the ships when I decided to pay for grad school completely through loans, and for $60k a year and no other prospects - I had no problem being a warm body with opposable thumbs. Or so I thought.
“Who the fuck is you?” This was the first question I heard on my first day of school in Harlem. Again it wasn’t a philosophical question, but maybe it should have been. I recall somewhere in grad school some professor talking about how one of the most important aspects of a P.E. class was making sure you nailed your transitions. You made sure your equipment was set-up before the kids came in so you didn’t waste precious class minutes dragging equipment in and out of the closet. This was of paramount importance.
This professor clearly had zero fucking experience working in the inner city. The kids wasted no time taking all the cones I had set up for the first lesson and started shooting them into the basketball hoops. When they got tired of that they literally kicked down the doors of the closets and ripped the basketballs from the cages inside. All directions were ignored.
I didn’t know this at the time but the staff of the school had a long standing tradition of betting into a deadpool. The game was simple, at the beginning of the year the veteran teachers who had survived more than two years in the school took bets on who they thought was going to quit halfway through the year. They placed their bets after the first month.
By the end of my first month I had experienced more failure and depression than I had at any other time in my life. I missed working with kids? What the fuck had I been thinking? By the end of September I had already seen more fights than I had ever seen in my entire life. One kid had been beaten so badly I had to show up to court to testify as a witness. Another kid playing a game of handball got knocked to the floor so hard his head smacked into the wood, and he suffered a major seizure. I had to call 911 and ask a student the school address because I couldn’t remember it. Not a single lesson plan ever went according to plan, and it always ended in frustration and rolling out a basketball. I was the number one bet in the deadpool.
I’ve got so many 1st year teacher nightmare stories I could break the internet. From having a gang take over my gymnasium, to getting cold clocked in the ear while trying to break up a fight, to the entire sophomore class bursting into a freshman gym class to watch four girls brawl it out, to watching a kid fling my laptop across the gymnasium, I probably saw more teacher shit in that first year than most see in their first ten. Go ahead and add in a new wake-up time of 5am and a lovely hour twenty min commute both ways. By all rights I should have quit before Christmas.
But I didn’t.
While each of those above stories deserves their due, and I’ll eventually get around to telling them, what you need to know is that I didn’t quit. I’ve been there for the last 6 years and I’m still here now. It has become a community I love and it has forced me to grow into the most capable version of myself yet. All those fuckers that bet against me lost their money, (turns out one of the “veterans” who took a bet on me ended up leaving halfway through) and even better, many of those fuckers have become good friends.
There are a lot of stories that changed me from hating the place to loving it…but the one I’ll tell here is the most important. What saved me? Weightlifting of course. When I returned to public education all green eyed and bushy tailed I had an express interest in creating a program where students had access to world class strength and conditioning. I wanted to take what I was doing at Crossfit Norwalk and stick it in a high school. Before I met Mike Sabato, I had spent over 5 years fumbling around in a Planet Fitness trying to figure out what I needed to do to get jacked. I wanted to create the strength and conditioning program I wish I had access to when I was a teenager.
In my job interview I had told the principal that I had an express interest in creating a weightlifting program. He was very happy to tell me that the school had a weight room and that I was free to use it how I saw fit….turns out the weight room was a closet where they kept weights. They had a couple pairs of dumbbells up to thirty pounds. Luckily I had been scavenging cheap equipment for a number of years in preparation to build a home gym….whenever I managed to buy a home. (Some backwards thinking there for sure.) I brought all of that equipment in my dads old VW bus to Harlem. It wasn’t much. Two squat racks, two barbells, and a bunch plates was all I had collected at the time. I put some fliers up around the school announcing that I was starting a weightlifting club after school for three days a week. Then I crossed my fingers and hoped someone would show up.
One kid showed up. His name was Luis. And he is the reason the club exists today.
I was blessed that Luis happened to be the kid who decided to show up. He was popular, he already had an interest in lifting weights, and he just brought kickass chaotic energy anywhere he was. I was worried when he realized he was the only kid he would treat the club as a joke and leave. Instead an insane grin appeared on his face and he yelled, “I got a personal trainer!?!? Woooooord.”
And so we trained. Everyday, my general education P.E. classes drove me nuts and frustrated every attempt I made to teach, but the weightlifting club made it a little bit easier to handle. I got to train Luis. I got to move the needle in the right direction. I was doing something right, even if the rest of the job made me feel like a failure.
After three months Luis had made some visible gains and the kids were talking about it. Luis being Luis loved the attention, and flaunted both himself and the club. He would flex and get a crazy look in his eye, and then just smile and say he had to eat more protein. When kids asked what he was doing he would say, “Yooooo, Schuerch is training kids after school! For free!” That was all it took for me to finally make a true dent in the school culture.
By the beginning of the second half of the year I had five kids showing up consistently and getting after it. They would pester me for nutrition trips, ask if they could lift during lunch, steal dumbbells during P.E. for bonus bicep curls. I’ve never gotten more satisfaction training a group of kids. At the end of the year every single kid had squatted over 200 hundred pounds for sets of five, and from what I could tell they had all gained a solid dose of confidence. They inspired a ton of kids to join next year which prompted me to buy more equipment and begin the difficult work of finding a space in the school that wasn’t a hallway. The status I gained as the weightlifting coach started to tumble down into my P.E. classes and while the transformation of those classes is another 10 page story in itself, lets just say those classes saw their own major improvement just from the growth of my reputation as a teacher who was putting in the work.
Fast forward 5 years. The weightlifting club is one of the biggest after school programs second only to the basketball team. My P.E. classes have seen a radical shift from hot flaming dumpster fires to somewhat organized sport teams. There’s a solid dose of respect between me and the student body. I enjoy spending time with many of my students. I’ve started to become the teacher I envisioned myself becoming all those years ago.
At the beginning of this three part bio, (for those of you still with me) I stated you can find any article on the internet to back up any opinion. You make choices every day about what information you consume and what you give your attention to. I wrote this bio because I want you the reader to know what perspective this information comes from. In the coming months (and perhaps years) I plan on writing about a number of health and education topics. Some will be informative and action based. Some will be musings. Most will be for the simple entertainment that comes from writing them.
But in a nutshell, here’s the perspective I’m writing from. Here’s my blog’s “why”. I’m a performance obsessed fitness junkie with education running straight through the veins. I’m constantly growing and changing. I like to help people. From my knowledge of health and performance, this blog is a direct extension of my hope to help people become better badass versions of themselves. I hope to provide tools that help you improve your biology. From my teacher experience I hope I can provide a couple posts that provide my fellow educators with some companionship. Some posts will be instructive, but most will probably be a reminder that this job is cool and crazy and weird and hilarious, and no one knows how to do it perfectly.
Zany humor and curse words will proliferate every article I produce, because fuck it, that’s how I do. And if it turns out I’m just churning out words into the infinite multiverse of the internet for no one to read…I’m cool with that too.
This is phenomenal. This is awesome!!!! I could not wait to read more