by Juliana Kaplan

Science teacher Tyler Wooley-Brown stands in front of his audience, ready to perform. However, unlike the band he used to perform with, Miller’s English, Wooley-Brown is the only performer, and his audience holds notebooks and pencils in their hands.

“For me, personally, most of teaching is performing,” Wooley-Brown said. “There’s a lot of grading and creating and that kind of stuff, but the in-class performance of getting the class on your side, getting them invested in what you’re doing, is very similar to the same type of thing you do when you’re on stage.”

Wooley-Brown has been in bands since he was 14 years old, creating and working with his church’s youth worship band, performing in both high school and college groups and eventually participating in sessions with fellow high school teachers. For certain units in his physics course regarding sounds and vibrations, he enjoys bringing his music into the classroom. He mainly plays electric bass, and likes to use it in class for units involving sound.

During his second year as a teacher, he would meet with several teachers on Thursday nights to perform. One of those teachers was School Within a School English teacher Keira Flynn-Carson.

“When I moved here it was kind of hard to make friends because I was always teaching,” Wooley-Brown said.

“The band was just a place to go to go hang out, meet people.”

For Flynn-Carson, who plays both the drums and snare drums, performing allows her to make both herself and others happy. Flynn-Carson has been in bands since she was 10 years old and went on tour while she was a teacher. She took a break from performing to be with her daughter, but has recently gotten back into it.

She is currently in two bands, an indie rock band and the community-based Jamaica Plain Honk Band. She said being in the bands gives her a break from thinking about her work or home life and allows her to focus solely on her music.

“Music just lets you be in the moment, playing drums, not having to think and think in a different way at the same time,” Flynn-Carson said. “It also gives me that nonverbal, ‘entering a group’ mentality.”
However, it is a very different situation for English teacher Ben Berman. Berman is a writer and a published poet. His poetry compilation, Strange Borderlands, came out in 2013.

“Poetry comes from this sense of grappling, struggling, trying to understand things through language,” Berman said.

Unlike Flynn-Carson and Wooley-Brown, Berman did not truly begin to be involved in creative writing until  he was in college.

“I used to be sort of a math and science guy, but I was really good at rewriting songs to make fun of my friends,” Berman said. “I was too small to play sports in a competitive way, so I mocked my friends and made songs about them  and saw how talented I was. How could I turn that down as a life?”

Berman said his work as a teacher gives him time to write in the summer and more flexibility when it comes to his writing schedule. However, he does have to wake up at about 3:30 or 4 a.m. to squeeze in about two hours of writing time. He said that bringing his writing background to the classroom allows him to share experiences with students, as well as shape his approach coming into a lesson.

“When you’re writing, you don’t really know what you’re doing a lot of times,” Berman said. “You kind of go into it because you want to figure things out along the way. So I think that I approach teaching in a similar way in that I usually come to a class with a lot more wonder than knowledge, which I think is different than some subjects. But creative writing classes allow you to do that.”

Wooley-Brown said that he has to work to make sure he can balance his music and teaching, but ultimately enjoys finding the right mix of both.

“There’s a pool of creativity in my life, and I can draw from it for certain things,” Wooley-Brown said. “I found that when I was doing that for music I had a little less to pull from for class, so finding the kind of balance back and forth was nice.”

For Flynn-Carson, at the end of the day, she enjoys knowing her art has both a positive inner and outer impact.

“It just kind of is like spreading a smile down the road,” Flynn-Carson said. “The Honk Band makes people happy.”

Juliana Kaplan can be contacted at [email protected].