I love this. Just love it. Longtime Brooklynite, Richard Grayson, a born and bred, Brooklyn boy puts something on my blog. It gets read by his 8th grade English and homeroom teacher from Meyer Levin Junior High School, Mr. Berger. He writes into OTBKB and Grayson reads it. VOILA: This from Richard Grayson, author of "I Break for Delmore Schwartz" "And To Think He Kissed Him On Lorimar Street," and more.
My old eighth grade English and homeroom teacher from Meyer Levin JHS!
Having just taught "Twelfth Night" last week to college students who
said it was too hard for them to read, I told them, "Well, we read it
in Mr. Berger’s class in eighth grade back in 1964 when I was twelve."I remember once seeing you outside the classroom for the first time.
On Saturday morning my father took us to get haircuts at George’s
Barbershop and Beauty Salon (men in front, women in back) on Church and
Troy Avenues. And while George was cutting my hair, you — wearing not
a shirt and tie but a sweatshirt, jeans and sneakers like me — sat
down in the next chair with Jack, who I recall asked you if you thought
"Catcher in the Rye" was too dirty for his son in high school to read.
You said no, of course.It was a wonder in those days to see our
sainted teachers outside the school in normal clothing, as we assumed
you just disappeared into the blackboard after 3 pm and reappeared at
8:30 am the next day. After my haircut, I met Billy and Eugene
Lefkowitz, also from 8SPE, at Buddy’s Fairyland arcade and fast food
place a few blocks from my house at the intersection of Flatbush,
Fillmore and Utica. I excited told them, "I saw Mr. Berger getting a
haircut! Like a regular person does!" We had burgers and fries, played
skeeball, and when I refused to go on the roller coaster, Billy said I
was a neurotic scaredycat. He threw up twice walking the seven blocks
to my house.Mr. Berger was one of the greatest English teachers I ever had. Certainly a lot better one than I’ve ever been.
I truly feel that I was the “Last of A Generation”. My parents moved into East Flatbush in the early seventies. I went to Meyer Levin in the early eighties and my sister in the late seventies.
As an undergrad at Syracuse, you get drilled with the rigors of a “Core Curriculum”. Sure, it’s pretty good. My true core curriculum was from the SP program at Meyer Levin. Mr. William Lohrer, by far was the GREATEST HISTORY TEACHER, ever. From the Magna Carta, to the Civil War, just about everything stuck and still resonates in my mind today. Mr. Levy’s biology and Mr. Marsala’s Algebra. It all stuck.
Of course it was Public School. Life was crazy, but also simpler. The seventies and eighties were a “Cauldron of Everything” but…I was honored to have a wonderful education from teachers who were at their prime. Teaching wasn’t a profession…it was a calling.
I’m a proud product of East Flatbush !
The comments about Mrs. Sanjour elicited wonderful, similar memories. I have often spoken to students of her reciting a good part of Julius Caesar to us students to make it come alive. I ended up teaching literature in a round about way, teaching Latin and Greek works in translation as a Classicist, along with the languages themselves. I often, even now, recall Mrs. Sanjour and the methods she used to inspire her students. At this time of the year, as I read the newspaper, I always recall her bringing up the fact that as soon as Christmas was over, the newspaper would shrink in size as the ads grew far fewer in number. And here we are at that time of the year again.
I also have to say that my ninth grade English teacher, Mrs. Hazel Sanjour, was similarly amazing. She was a longtime teacher at Meyer Levin and in later years moved across the street to the just-closed Samuel J. Tilden High School. My friend Steve Kahn dedicated his Ph.D. dissertation in Math to Mrs. Sanjour, who said her name was unrhymeable — but one of our classmates, Phyllis, came up with “grandeur”! In retirement she lived near me in South Florida, when I was a law school administrator and community college English teacher.
Mrs. Sanjour had us not only read The Odyssey but put out a newspaper with Homeric events in it and write out our own multi-chapter epics. When we read Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” we each had to memorize and recite a long soliloquy of our choice. In addition to teaching “Twelfth Night” this past year in my Literature and Writing classes at the School of Visual Arts, I also taught “Julius Caesar,” and I recited for my class Brutus’s soliloquy that I memorized, still recalling it after more than 40 years. And when I showed the 1953 film of “Julius Caeasar” with Marlon Brando and James Mason, I told the class that Mrs. Sanjour had taken us on a class trip by bus to the Eighth Street Playhouse in Greenwich Village (pretty exotic for us East Flatbush kids) to see the film. I actually still reproduced Mrs. Sanjour’s comments about the play and film that I could recall.
She also taught us and had us write limericks and more obscure and interesting poetic forms like the quatrain and the clerihew (I was amused to find the latter recently “discovered” by a prominent litblogger). We were forced to commit to memory William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus” (“Out of the night that covers me/ Black as the pit from pole to pole/ I thank whatever gods may be/ For my unconquerable soul, etc.”) and all 33 of us recited the poem in turn.
Both Mr. Berger and Mrs. Sanjour taught me how to take devastating criticism of my writing in my first efforts at short fiction. Mr. Berger explained (rather too sarcastically, I thought at the time) why it wasn’t a good idea to use Roget’s Thesaurus to find novel words; when I referred to someone’s “acrid fate,” it had a connotation other than the “bitter” I’d been looking for. And I can still recall Mrs. Sanjour’s withering tone when she gave the class back our short stories: “Oh, and Richard’s ‘The Bus Ride’: that was, uh, THRIL-LING.” On the paper she was no less biting about my sentence, “The young woman had bright red hair strewn all around her.” But she also explained carefully what I’d really said and I got the hilarious picture.
A classmate who I know Mr. Berger and Mrs. Sanjour also influenced greatly is Linda Konner, now a well-known literary agent but also the author of numerous books on diet, health, beauty, trends and other subjects, and former editor (and sometimes editor-in-chief) at such magazines as Weight Watchers, Seventeen, Redbook and Women’s World. Both of us were subjected to the endless lessons on usage and diction our junior high English teachers provided, along with hours of meticulous sentence diagramming. When I started teaching my first English classes downtown at Long Island University in the mid-1970s, I know it’s because of Mr. Berger and Mrs. Sanjour that I got this comment on a student evaluation: “He is genious at grammer!” I also owe them the medal for English that I got at graduation from junior high in June 1965.
Having spent much of the last 15 years reading first-year law students’ legal memoranda and essay examinations, I can only say that I wish they had had great junior high school (now middle school, I guess) English teachers like Mrs. Sanjour and Mr Berger.