I don’t know if I’ve ever written about Mr. Helming, my 10th grade social studies teacher, before, but I’ve certainly been thinking about doing it for a long time.
I’m almost 34 years old and I still think about Helming’s class from when I was 15 years old.
In September of 2020, at the beginning of the second school year during the pandemic, I became a high school teacher. I teach English class – American Literature to 11th graders. I’ve had what some might think of as a comically long list of jobs in many fields, but truthfully I’ve liked almost all of them and only ever left to pursue better opportunities (Money. It’s always been for money). So here I’ve found myself now a public school teacher, happily earning what public school teachers earn, never off the clock, at the logical end result of my double degrees in English writing and Spanish language.
For the first time since I barely graduated high school in 2005, I find myself back again, except this time it’s my classroom. I’m the teacher. What kind of teacher would I be? What kind of teacher do I want to be? Who made my less than amazing high school experience just a little more bearable so that I didn’t drop out like I almost did (a few times)?
My 10th grade school year at East Meadow High School, in East Meadow, New York, was the last school year I would spend in the town I grew up in. It was the last time I would have classes and pass notes, draw cartoons on the back of tests, and do silly teenager stuff with my friends, some I’ve known since kindergarten, or make new friends with people I only barely knew from town. It was the 2002-2003 school year. The year before, as a freshman, the school year was dominated by that beautiful, crisp, cloudless Tuesday morning when the Twin Towers collapsed and we all got sent home early. School buses full of kids driving away in one direction, all of Nassau County’s EMS vehicles driving in the other direction, toward ground zero.
“I’m going to go right down to the recruitment office and join the Marines” I heard two older boys I’ve never seen before or since say on the school bus. The school year had just started. This was my first few weeks in high school.
The year I had Mr. Helming started off much better, even though by the end of it, my parents would be divorced, I’d be living in a state I had never once visited, and my entire life would be diverging along a path I hadn’t imagined and was out of my control.
What kind of teacher would I be? What kind of teacher do I want to be?
Helming taught social studies to me, most of my friends, and all the kids I would play music with that year in high school. Between lessons, he’d play the Dead Kennedys, he wore Sublime t-shirts under his sweaters, and he made all of us laugh. He made learning fun. I still remember the way he taught us about Stalin and the Soviet Union – the whole class had to draw little pairs of pants, but half the class got just #2 pencils and white paper, and the other half got crayons and construction paper. The kids with pencils were only rewarded with more pencils to do their work, while the kids who made colorful pants got real rewards, like candy. This was how he taught us about communism and capitalism.
He was a bass player and would play music with some of the other teachers. One day after class, I stayed in his room with a few of my friends and we passed a guitar around. We went through a bunch of punk songs we all liked, and by the time I headed off to my next class, the period was almost over. I had almost missed my entire biology class, but I told the teacher I was playing guitar with Helming and she never said a word about it.
We liked to make him laugh as much as he liked to make us laugh. One time, me and my friend Jordan rewrote the ending to Of Mice and Men for our English class project (which probably wasn’t the assignment) where we made the entire book the fever dream of Lenny, who was really a lobotomized mental patient, in an institution and pretending that a pen cap he found was his friend named George. Our English teacher hated it and failed us for the assignment.
But Mr. Helming loved it and couldn’t stop cracking up. He pinned it to his bulletin board for the entire school year so everyone could read it.
One time, we had a lesson that just didn’t go well. I don’t remember what it was exactly, I think something about Pol Pot and he was trying to incorporate a music video. In any case, the lesson was a dud, and Mr. Helming knew it, maybe a result of his entertainer’s personality. I stuck around after class and he told me “I fucked up.” I wasn’t shocked because I heard my cool teacher say “fuck,” but because I heard a grown up admit their own failure. “That just didn’t go the way I planned. I fucked it up.”
The adults in the room can be wrong, they can lose control of a situation. Because that was what I was experiencing in life outside the classroom.
It was important for me as a teenager, especially at that point in my life, with my world beginning to come undone, and my parents splitting up for real, that I know that grownups can fuck up. The adults in the room can be wrong, they can lose control of a situation. Because that was what I was experiencing in life outside the classroom. The grownups around me were losing control. In fact, the whole world was losing control on the news every day, and I was just part of it. Mr. Helming fucked up and didn’t try to hide it or deny it. That was more important to 15 year old me than anything he was attempting to teach us that day.
Truthfully, I hated my hometown and always wanted to leave. I don’t like or even miss Long Island. The change of scenery wasn’t what scared me. It was the loss of everything else. I knew that I wasn’t going to finish growing up with all of my friends I had known all this time. I wasn’t going to go to prom with them, play in bands with them anymore, get our licenses together, get in trouble together, none of that. I’d always be “the kid who moved away” and somebody else’s “new kid in school.” I had an old identity to come to terms with severing, and a new identity to learn how to adapt to.
Soon I would be sitting on the blinding white hot concrete of a newly-built high school in Florida, with the apparent intention of resembling a prison, unlike my 1950s brick high school in East Meadow, sweating through my black hoodie, surrounded by the deafening sound of insects from the surrounding swamp. “Are you from New York? Do you have an accent? Are you Jewish?” I’d soon be fielding all kinds of unusual questions from my new classmates.
But before I left East Meadow for good, I had to take the New York State Regents Exam, a notoriously tough state standardized test. We all had time slots to report to the gymnasium which was set up with hundreds of desks in rows by alphabet like you’d see in the movies. The entire gym, full of students nervously shifting in their seats. Test proctors, very surly-like delivering official directions and test booklets and bubble sheets for answers, all moving up and down the rows. The proctor for my row was Mr. Helming.
At this point in the school year, I was regrettably cutting ties with most of my friends so that the pain and upset of leaving them all wouldn’t be so bad. I had gotten kicked out of the band I was playing in, understandably, because I would be leaving the state probably forever. It’s hard to argue with that logic, but I was still pretty pissed off. I didn’t want to talk to anyone – just finish packing and leave. Only a few people really knew this would be my last school year with them and I was moving far away. I never told any of my teachers, not even the ones I liked.
Mr. Helming came down our row and stopped at my desk, and leaned down really close to whisper in the cavernous gym under strict no-talking rules.
“I heard you’re moving to Florida.”
“Yeah.”
“That really sucks. Good luck.”
He smiled and kept walking, handing out test materials. I don’t know how he found out, but he’s the only teacher who ever said anything to me about it.
That despite the constant testing, the state standards, the constant monitoring and observing of educational goals and benchmarks, that sometimes the differences made will be long after I’m a part of their lives.
I saw Mr. Helming once more after I moved and before he died. While visiting New York, some of my friends were going to go see his band play at some local bar. I didn’t have a car and wasn’t old enough to drink, so it was hard for me to get to the place, but I saw the very end of their set. I said hi, and of course he remembered me, but I felt really awkward and out of place like I had intruded on a timeline I wasn’t part of anymore. At the time, I was working at a hair salon with my mom, and when Helming asked what I was up to in Florida, I said “hustling shampoo.” He thought that was pretty funny.
I know some of my friends would stay connected with him after they graduated and would play music together. I never got the chance. He died unexpectedly a few years later at just 46 years old. Heart failure.
So what kind of teacher do I want to be? How do I want my students to remember me when they are 30, 40, 50 years old? I want them to know I care enough to make them laugh, and when they make me laugh I’m going to share it. I care enough to admit when I fuck up. That they can stay late in my class and play guitar if they need to. And that if they move away and have to leave everything because the grownups around them fucked up, and they’re so angry they don’t even tell anybody, that they will be still be missed.
Shortly after I got my classroom, I began filling it with music. I keep a guitar and a ukulele, and a few other things ready for anyone that wants to play. And they do. I texted one of my longest, and best friends, Andrew, “I think I’m turning into Helming.” Andrew has his own family now, and here we both are, still remembering our 10th grade social studies teacher.
Of course I wish I could reach out to him on Facebook and tell him how thankful I really am for him that year. How deeply a few small interactions affected me, and how they steered me to where I am today. Like a butterfly flapping its wings and causing a tsunami on the other side of the world. I wish I could thank him, play music with him, swap stories. I wish I could visit New York and go see his band play with all my friends again, and maybe buy him a beer this time. But I can’t anymore. That’s another divergent timeline that I can’t get back.
I know that sometimes teachers don’t ever see the fruits of their labors. That despite the constant testing, the state standards, the constant monitoring and observing of educational goals and benchmarks, that sometimes the differences made will be long after I’m a part of their lives. I know this.
I consider myself very fortunate that I had a teacher like Mr. Helming even once. Because if I can have the kind of influence on any of my students that he had on me, one time is all it takes.
