new teacher profiles
‘Streets’ smart
Feb 15, 2007 12:21 PM
Native Minnesotan finds his niche
"More and more I am finding ways to reach these kids," says Michael Mapel, who teaches at the Region 7 Suspension Center.
If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere, Michael Mapel kept hearing. And it wasn’t Frank Sinatra singing about New York.
It was advice from a veteran teacher about the Region 7 Superintendent’s Suspension Center in Brooklyn where Mapel, not too long out of Minnesota, had just been assigned at the start of his first year.
The old-fashioned chorale room at FDR HS was filled with 6th- to 12th-graders with major attitude and a record of either carrying weapons or selling drugs, gang-fighting or assaulting teachers — a kind of nightmare one-room schoolhouse that was most definitely not on the prairie.
And it was definitely not what Mapel imagined for himself when planning to move to the city of his dreams and teach science.
“When I visited my brother in London, that was my first exposure to multiculturalism and urban-cosmo vibes in a great city, and I knew New York would be the American equivalent,” Mapel said, “a place that had an appreciation of the arts and writing.”
Now the lover of literature and aspiring writer was faced with a bunch of kids “who despised reading,” he said.
Anyway, it was just a temporary appointment, a way to get his foot in the door.
Then one day, Mapel was told he had been hired permanently. “I was a bit baffled,” he said. “It felt a bit fatalistic.”
Nevertheless Mapel decided to accept his fate for the time being, “to really focus in and commit myself to it.” By the time he was in his second year, an interesting thing happened to the man who loved New York. He began to love working with the city’s most difficult, intriguing, angry, street-smart kids.
“The difficulty of working with them and what makes it a pleasure are one and the same thing,” he said. “It really challenges a teacher to be creative, to find new approaches to engage kids like this and to teach kids of different ages at once.”
Mapel was intimidated at first because he had heard all kinds of stories about the kinds of kids he’d be dealing with, but then came to the realization that they really are just children.
“A lot of them have very tough exteriors but a good deal of that has to do with confusion and fear,” Mapel said. “They have a lot of emotional issues. Most of them are very decent kids who come from extremely difficult circumstances.”
In order to reach his students and prevent the environment from evolving into utter chaos, Mapel said, he needed a crash course in classroom management. He credited 40-year teacher Marvin Bernstein for being an unofficial mentor, another experienced teacher, Velaire Pressoir, for being an excellent role model, and fellow new teacher Brian Quinn for being a very close, cooperative colleague.
“I never expect my job to be easy, yet more and more I am finding ways to reach these kids,” Mapel said. “Part of their gig is that they have to be really sharp, the language, the words that are always ready on their tongues! Some of them are very funny. They’ve got to be real at the drop of a hat in their street world but they don’t have a clue about real honesty, about integrity, consequences or consistency.
“New York is so fantastic, there’s a certain rhythm to the street that a lot of these kids dance to, and reaching them is about being able to catch that rhythm, work with it.”
