Gentler Time: When a Rookie Teacher was Tossed into a Brooklyn School

Richard had wandered off by himself, some of the girls ran up to tell me. I asked them to let him know to come closer so I could see him. They did, and he did. The kids played a little more. I continued to sit on a bench in Harlem’s Mount Morris Park until it was time for all of us to catch the subway back to Brooklyn.

It was May, 1967 and I was near the end of a troubling, challenging, and ultimately most wonderful ten months of teaching sixth grade at a Brooklyn, New York elementary school. I graduated from Brooklyn College the year before on the five-year plan, having no idea of what would come next. My friends were already on their way to becoming lawyers, doctors, dentists, and drug dealers. I was lost.

Someone told me that the New York City Board of Education was woefully short of K-6 school teachers and was on the search for anyone who could fill the gap. In a wondrous six weeks at an intensive summer course held at City College of New York, they crammed my cranium with educational theory and practice, gave me a temporary teaching license, and assigned me to an elementary school accompanied by the magnificent salary of $5,400 a year.

P.S. 161 was a formidable five-story brick building whose doors first opened to children in the 1920s. The school’s student body was reflective of its Crown Heights neighborhood at the tail end of a transition from being predominantly white and heavily Jewish to majority African American with a strong Caribbean lilt. The nearby Hasidic community maintained an entirely separate educational system. I was blithely unaware of the tensions between Blacks and Jews (the latter the majority of New York City’s, and PS 161’s teachers). That tension would erupt only a few years later in a massively disruptive teacher’s strike over local control of the city’s public schools.

Words fail in describing the chaotic first months of teaching class 6-3 to which I was assigned by the principal Emil Rosenbluth, a nice man, a career educator now perpetually running on empty in the rapidly changing school environment. I knew nothing about sixth graders other than having been one. I knew nothing about being a teacher. I knew nothing about the cultures of my students. I did not know that class numbers were assigned by reading ability, with the 6-1 class being the most adept, 6-6 the least. The kids knew this system, but I did not. In short, I knew nothing about anything that might help dig me out of a hole that only three months earlier had been the flat ground of confusion and aimlessness constituting my life.

Muddling along would be far too sanguine in describing my first half of the school year. The books provided for teaching reading were of the Dick and Jane variety, virtually the same ones that mystified me as a youth by describing the lives of apple-cheeked Caucasian youngsters in a town in America’s heartland. I was the son and grandson of immigrants from Eastern Europe, so Dick and Jane were as alien to me as they likely were to the sons and daughters of the West Indies who sat in my classroom.

In those first several months at P.S. 161 I was often depressed, had nightmares, was angry and frightened by my lack of ability to teach, to do the daily prep work, to handle problem students, and to complete the required administrative tasks. At a parent-teacher night it was embarrassingly clear that moms and dads were speaking to a young man who lacked a brain. Every day I had to struggle to get up, have breakfast, and make my way to school.

What I did have was resourcefulness, curiosity, and an endless supply of ingenuous youth, willing to try anything, believing it could get done. I put on a play that was based on a record I had as a child called Herman Ermine in Rabbit Town, a thinly veiled lesson in racism, a subject that my students were certainly more familiar with than I. The record was narrated by the late actor John Garfield, and it had been produced in 1946 by Mitch Miller, a musician who later hosted “Sing Along with Mitch,” a hugely popular TV show.

Miller had an office in Manhattan. I wangled a meeting with him seeking a clean copy of the record. The one owned by my family had gone through the hands of five children and was so worn that you could almost see daylight through the grooves. Not only did Miller provide me a clean copy from his original master and some great conversation, he also insisted on
coming to 161 to do a sing-along with the whole school. It was a smashing success, and scores of parents and neighborhood folks packed the auditorium after getting wind of the unannounced event through the local grapevine.

All began to change gradually and persistently as we emerged into 1967. A love affair seemed to slowly blossom between a young man of 23 and 27 twelve-year-olds. Trust between us grew, and my skills, though still lacking, had improved. I wish I had been more attentive to doing my own pedagogical homework, but the siren call of the ’60s and all sorts of experimentations tended to dominate my private time.

Discipline was no longer a big problem with only occasional flare-ups. The students read more comfortably, were more respectful to each other, tried hard at mathematics. The hallways at 161 and perhaps some of their home lives tended towards the chaotic, but for the most part our classroom emerged as a sea of relative tranquility. I deeply appreciated the stability that permeated the classroom. In the time we spent together we made ourselves into a small community apart from all our external realities.

Not everything worked out as I had planned. In a fit of optimism about world peace and togetherness I decided the kids needed to see the United Nations. Everyone liked getting on the subway, and the UN building was quite intriguing. Unfortunately, the woman who made a presentation to us and other visiting students was crushingly boring and condescending. I was furious, and the kids fell asleep. So much for world peace!

Since childhood I have been intrigued by the history and cultures of non-Western societies. Upon returning to college after a year off I discovered political science as a major with an emphasis on the politics of what were then called “developing nations.” I had discovered an album of music called “Drums of Passion” issued in 1960, featuring traditional music of Nigeria by drummer/singer Babatunde Olatunji who had been living in the US since the early 1950s. I was transfixed and even today can sing the lyrics of two of the songs.

Someone told me that Olatunji’s wife was a librarian at the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, a remarkable WPA-era building at Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza. She was a most gracious woman, and she told me that her husband had received a large grant from the Rockefeller Foundation and opened a school for African music and dance on Lexington Avenue in Harlem. I paid him a visit and asked if he could offer some classes to my students. Yes!

Once a week the whole class trekked from Brooklyn to Harlem by train and back. The charge per class for each kid was one dollar. If someone didn’t have a buck, no problemo. Try to do that today? Not likely. 1967 was a different time and so trusting was I of my students we would walk to the train, go up to Harlem, take a wonderful class with Olatunji and his assistant, and then return to Brooklyn. I had to get parental consent slips and Mr. Rosenbluth’s permission. Otherwise, no forms to fill out, and no parents came with us. It was a joyous time for me and the kids.

I believe the school’s administration allowed me this leeway because I seemed to have an “orderly” classroom, a rapport with my students, with a soupçon of the Mitch Miller success thrown in. The administrators were searching for solutions in their world of educational ferment. How much actual progress the students made in reading, writing, and math I cannot say. No administrator ever came in to observe my class, about which I was conflicted, both relieved and irritated.

Our visits to Olatunji took three to four hours total and by the time we returned to 161 it was near the end of the school day. I made the decision that immediately after the class we should go to nearby Mt. Morris Park arriving back at school near afternoon dismissal. The kids would frolic and I would sit on a bench watching what transpired. No drama, no accidents, no lost kids. All of it was risky of course, but liberating for all of us especially me.

Those days in Harlem were soon to be topped by the grand finale of the 1966-67 school year. Class 6-3 performed what they had learned for the entire school. The great surprise was that Olatunji himself came and performed with them. Unbeknownst to the class or to me, he brought along dashikis especially made for the event for each student to wear and keep. It was a remarkably generous donation of time, effort, and money by him and his colleagues.

The performance took place very near the end of the school year and had an electrifying impact on the students of class 6-3. They were the kings and queens of the sixth grade for the remaining time. I remember one teacher telling me how proud the kids were to claim the title especially around students from class 6-1, the smarty-pants. She told me that they would go up to other kids proudly pointing to themselves saying, “6-3!”

Those ten months at PS 161 started with great difficulty and finished with great joy. In recent years I have thought more and more of the children and how life unfolded for them. I want to know that they are safe. That they have had enjoyment and pleasure, that they have children and grandchildren. That they did good, and been treated well in return.

After my retirement I began a serious search, at least for the half dozen or so names I remember. Over time I have worn out my keyboard perusing the internet for leads including cold calls to people with the same names or those that might have known them. I mean how many Russell Pembertons are there out there? More than you might think.

Several times I called and wrote the office and administrators at 161 to seek any information that would be helpful. Sad to say they were most unaccommodating, even downright rude. I guess there is little cachet to being a former teacher from the Jurassic Period. With no success, I reached out to the Board of Education of the City of New York, a daunting bureaucracy with on-line and phone systems designed to stymie even the most diligent of inquiries.

Recently I discovered that there is a PS 161 alumni group on Facebook. I resurrected my wife’s derelict log-in and left a posting. No bites, but a bunch of people responded including two old buddies making contact after many years. Sweet.

So there I leave it. An incredible and ultimately rewarding year of my life. The first real accomplishment I achieved as a young adult. Perhaps it’s best not to have found any of my former students. If I do finally locate someone, the response after I introduce myself might be, “Who?”