What happens when a baseball coach, a sailor and an electrician walk into a classroom?

Just ask Brad Alter, a 6th-grade special education teacher at Spring Creek Community School in East New York, Brooklyn. Now in his third year of teaching, Alter intentionally sought out an eclectic mix of jobs and experiences after graduating from Bard College with a degree in sociology in 2002.

After a stint working at the famed Strand Bookstore just after graduation, Alter set off on a three-month cross-country bicycling trip.

“That experience of meeting different communities and people got me interested in engaging in communities,” says Alter, who grew up in central New Jersey. “What is a community across America and how does that look different?”

One of his most memorable pre-teaching jobs was working as a Stagehands’ Union electrician on the set of the soap opera “As the World Turns.” The skills he learned while rigging sets led to a position leading students on sailing expeditions up the Hudson River.

In the summers, Alter also worked as a literacy and baseball coach with the nonprofit organization Harlem RBI. The curiosity his 5th-graders displayed sparked his interest in teaching middle school.

“I liked how younger students ask such blunt questions that are so authentic,” he says. “So much is happening at that age; it’s a crazy stage of their lives.”

Deciding to pursue a teaching career after almost a decade of diverse experiences, Alter returned to graduate school to study adolescent social studies.

After earning his master’s degree in 2012, Alter was hired as a founding teacher in a 6th-grade integrated co-teaching classroom at Spring Creek.

“There was the challenge of being a first-year teacher and the challenge of helping to build a new school,” he says. “People said, ‘This is hard, and it’s not supposed to be easy right now.’ Being validated that way makes such a difference.”

Thanks to his experience as an electrician on a TV production set, Alter is now the technology supervisor of the school’s burgeoning drama program, working with a team of students to maintain the theater’s sound board and lighting equipment.

His interest in exploring the role of communities has led to an effort to create relationships with neighborhood organizations like the Brooklyn Historic Society and East New York Farms.

“We’re always saying that kids learn best by doing,” he says. “So there’s a heavy focus on research and project-based learning. We want to prepare them to be engaged citizens.”

As he expected, his wide-ranging background has come in handy.

“All these different experiences gave me a skill set that made teaching a natural choice,” he says, “because teaching is such a dynamic profession.”