Mr. Brooks Interview
By Roberta Nin Feliz
Mr. Noel Brooks is an English teacher here at MCSM. He was kind enough to answer a few questions about his life and role as a teacher for our curious readers!
Q: What’s one thing about teenagers you will never seem to understand, and why?
A: Well, I suppose mostly it’s when kids are in denial about their grades. When they have a really bad grade and I ask them “How are you going to improve this?” and they just respond “I’m going improve it.” I don’t understand how they don’t seem to notice that they’re not doing the work… they’re not doing the reading, or not passing the quizzes. So it’s sort of like a state of denial. I mean I suppose that’s true for people in general because a lot of people live in denial, it’s not just teenagers.
Q: When have you been most satisfied with your life?
A: I think when I’m doing something that’s creative. I feel the most satisfied with my life when I’m able to express something that has a strong creative component to it. It could be anything, like sometimes teaching is creative, or sometimes drawing is creative. It depends on the moment but those are the most satisfying moments for me–the creative moments.
Q: What’s the hardest part about being a teacher?
A: The hardest part is giving grades. That’s true for a lot of teachers, it’s really tough.
Q: Why?
A: Because you want to be fair. I don’t know what kids think but I don’t like to fail students. It’s very hard when students fail, it makes me feel bad.
Q: Do you think that the “numbers” on students’ report cards accurately represent a student’s true intelligence?
A: No. They have nothing to do with intelligence. I don’t think it has anything to do with it.
Q: If you could go back in time and relive a moment, what moment would it be?
A: The moment when I dropped out of school.
Q: Why?
A: I wish I hadn’t dropped out. I wish I had stayed in college. It was dumb
Q: Really?
A: Yeah, yeah it was really dumb, but whatever.
Q: Do you think it’s possible to know the truth without challenging it first? And why?
A: Boy, that’s a heavy question. I don’t know quite what it means to challenge the truth. I know what it means to challenge authority. [*chuckles*] But I don’t know what it means to challenge the truth. I don’t know how you challenge the truth. It is the lies which you challenge. You challenge lies, not truth.
Q: What if you think the “truth” is a lie?
A: Well if you think the truth is a lie then I guess you’re just mistaken, you don’t know what’s real. I think most of us go through a process of trying to figure out what the truth is and very often we’re mistaken. We make mistakes and we think something is maybe a lie and it turns out to be the truth…but that’s the process of growing. I mean it depends on what you mean by truth and lies. Truth is a very relative concept. Whether truth even exists, I’m not totally sure. I don’t know whether it exists, it might or it might not. But truth is relative to a large degree, and truth is also an abstraction that’s pretty hard to pin down. When you say something is true, I don’t know what you mean by that. I mean we could fill a library, and people have, with what you mean by truth. It’s a philosophical question: What is the truth? This is called essentially, epistemology. This is an epistemological question: what can you know? What is it possible to know? Truth is one of the things that you don’t know if you can know it or not.
Q: To what degree do you feel you’ve controlled the course your life has taken?
A: I feel like I’ve made a lot choices, and I suppose in the end I’m probably what is known as an existentialist. An existentialist more or less believes that you’re responsible for most of the choices in your life. I think most us are responsible one way or another. Again that’s a pretty heavy philosophical question because there are things in our life we don’t control. We don’t control our death, we don’t control our birth or sex. We don’t control many things about what we are or where we’re born. But we definitely do make a lot of choices and every choice takes you down a different road.
I don’t know if you’ve ever read Robert Frost’s poem where he wrote, “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.” It’s about the choices we make in life. He has to decide which one he’s going to take, which road am I going to take? That’s the way life is. We constantly have to take one road or the other, so you choose. Robert Frost says ,”Way leads on to way” and it’s about the various different ways you can go. I think we are responsible in that sense and yeah there are certainly many things in our lives that we don’t control. For example, we don’t control the weather, we don’t control other people, and we don’t control all kinds of things. I can walk out of here tomorrow, a brick could fall on my head, and that’s not under my control.
Q: What was your major in college and what made you want to pursue it?
A: I had a double major in English and Philosophy. I pursued English because I like literature a lot. I actually did an English writing major because I like to write. I pursued philosophy because I think philosophy is just one of the most important subjects. I think everybody should study philosophy. I think if we studied more philosophy our lives would be more enlightened. We would make decisions more carefully, and think more about what we did if we thought more about things in a philosophical way.
Q: What was the hardest part of high school for you?
A: Staying there. I hated high school.
Q: Why?
A: Because I thought it was a bunch of crap, I thought most of what we learned was useless and I didn’t see the point of it. I didn’t understand what the purpose of education was. I didn’t know why I was there and I didn’t like the atmosphere. I didn’t like that it seemed very confining and very limiting. I believed there was a lot of petty stuff in social life, and the process through which we try to figure things out about males, females, and life. It was a very confusing time for me. I hated high school. I really did.
Q: So do you understand the purpose of high school, now that you’re a teacher?
A: Do I understand it? Not entirely. I have mixed feelings about high school. Sometimes I think high school is not such a great thing. Sometimes I feel like high school does a lot to get children to conform to certain standards that may not necessarily help them in their lives but may make them more sort of like robots. Sometimes I think that schooling in general–but particularly maybe high school–is aimed at making kids into conformists rather than individuals. I think that a lot of the whole emphasis on grades very often takes students down that road where they’re too worried about grades and not worried enough about themselves. For example, people who make moral choices are individuals who have to decide the difficult problems in life. Grades are, in my view, not that important. I don’t think they ultimately mean that much in life. I think the important things in life have to do with who you are as a person and what your values are.
Q: What do you think is the most distinctive trait of the MCSM community?
A: The most distinctive trait I think is the student body. I think the students are generally really good students, they’re nice and they’re smart. I think that’s a really distinctive thing about the school, that it has really good students.