Benjamin Kahrl teaches social studies.

Where have you taught previously? Is BHS different from those schools?

Plymouth, Mass. and Dartmouth, Mass. BHS is far more urban. Plymouth is the largest and Dartmouth is the second largest town in the state, so that they’re wide-open rural farming communities. Low-income levels are higher in both those communities.  They are ethnically far less diverse. The range of students here at Brookline is much higher in terms of from the top to bottom.

How have projects that you have done in the past that affected your teaching and you personally?

In terms of my teaching, I think that one of the things that is important in world history is trying to get kids to think about the world from new perspectives and points of view. Being able to go to countries helps me understand other peoples’ points of view better. I think bringing that in has had a big effect. I’ve done a project in the past, I haven’t done it here yet, that was about AIDS in developing countries and students had to design projects to address AIDS in an African country. They were able to actually call a couple of countries in Africa and to speak with friends of mine, so that was pretty cool. In terms of personally, I think that it’s affected me by saying, “Any time, what could be considered a bad day is better than any day a lot of people have in a developing world.” It kind of gives you perspective.

Last year you were a long term sub and you used your experiences to help you teach. Has that changed from last year to this year?

I think last year helped me a little bit to understand the students at Brookline. They’ve got a series of different expectations primarily concerned with conduct in the hallways and it’s much more liberal. You don’t need hall passes. I think that is probably the biggest adjustment for me of the two schools.  But other than that it’s not a whole lot different. I taught AP Gov which was different than the other APs I’ve taught, but the idea of getting ready for a test and lining up the curriculum is not new.

Do you have any other hobbies or interests?

Military history is a little bit of a hobby. I studied military history in graduate school at Ohio State and got a Master’s in it. I coach my daughter in soccer.

Can you tell me how your family affected any of your life choices?

My mother has been on the [Pathfinder] board all the way back to the 1960s and I often travel with her or with other siblings. That’s been a tremendous influence in terms of my own life choice to be with that organization.  She grew up in a time when women didn’t have access to family planning, because it was actually illegal to mail contraceptives to people without her husband’s permission, and she saw women dying of abortions. That clearly has had a deep effect on me in terms of my interest in it. In terms of my own career, my dad was a college professor teacher, as was his father, so that’s made me interested. I like the high school level because I see more day-to-day contact than I would have at the university level, which I enjoy. I think that’s really the influence in terms of my own work here. I like teaching, and I like working with my students, and that’s persisted even after I’ve had my own family.

Could you tell me more about the two schools you taught at before BHS?

Plymouth South and Dartmouth High School. Plymouth South is a third technical school, so a third of the kids are involved in auto shop or culinary or anything like that, which gives it a little bit of a different feel, because that means that a third of the kids are generally not focused on their four-year degree after high school. It was a smaller school than Brookline at 1,200 kids when I was there. This was 20 years ago. Plymouth was a bigger town of 100 square miles, so kids were really spread out versus the sort of urban feel.  Kids just didn’t go into the city very often, because it was a long way and traffic, and a lot more grinding poverty in many ways. I had a kid who had

dental problems and I thought, “Gosh, he doesn’t brush his teeth,” and it turns out he was an alcoholic living out of his car because he was homeless. He would throw up and rot his teeth. No wonder he didn’t care about medieval history. I saw that kind of thing more often than I do here. That’s not to say there aren’t low-income students here, but I just think I saw it more often in Plymouth. Dartmouth is the second largest town in the state, so there are a lot more rural areas in the town. It does have a higher low-income base. It’s very underfunded.   think Brookline’s funding here is somewhere around $16,000-17,000 per student per year. In Dartmouth, it was just over ten. There are a ton more things that could go on here that can’t go on there, and really it’s great to be here because of that. But it’s just a different mindset. It’s far more working class, and far more I think, kids whose parents who have not attended college, and many of the kids have Portuguese backgrounds. But far fewer kids are going to college. Here the idea of a kid not doing post-secondary education is not absent, but there are a lot more kids who are going to four-year schools whereas there, if a kid gets into an Ivy League school, that’s a good year. I worked on getting APs expanded—here you don’t need to do that. In fact, there may be some students who are probably overextended. We didn’t see that nearly as much there.

What other impact did you have on the schools and what did you do as a teacher to help?

I think Dartmouth was bigger. I was in Plymouth for only four years to start my career. I coached, I helped start indoor track, which didn’t exist in Plymouth before I was there, at least at Plymouth South. Dartmouth, we expanded AP and social studies from 10 kids to 210-212 kids. so a lot of average kids were getting in and getting prepared for college, and they weren’t before we added five new AP classes. I taught AP Human Geography, AP World and AP Macroeconomics, and I started an Amnesty International chapter. I didn’t start it, actually. Kids did, and they came to me and asked me about it and we would go to DC  once a year, and go down to Capitol Hill, and go into Congress and lobby Congress for human rights.

Is there a different teaching method you used at those schools compared to at BHS?

I think you still need to learn how to do research and they still need to learn how to think. So I think that type of interaction is important. Learning how the kids learn how to trust you, that we are all in this together, rather than this model of teachers.

Sarah Gladstone can be contacted at [email protected].