Bruce Green
Instructor, El Cerrito High School
Biographical Profile/Personal Reflections
"Look," I said, "I went to high school and college between 1962 and 1969; that probably says something about my formative years." I was talking with a good deal of attitude to the 16 year old interviewer. But only because we were in front of the entire class doing a mock interview. I needed to be tough to simulate the experience, but the answer was truthful. I was responding to predictable questions about what it was like during the Sixties. Questions I expected because mine is a classroom that, aside from pictures of Alice Walker and John Steinbeck, Welty and Salinger, also contains photos of Muhammad Ali and Howlin' Wolf, Bob Dylan and Rosa Parks.
I think there is a great deal of truth to the notion that what we see during crucial years of our lives becomes a good deal of who we are. I saw the Summer of Love and the Civil Rights Movement. I saw the letters of a close friend who died in Vietnam and what Washington DC looks like with 20,000 people in the street. I saw the dark alleys of Houston, and the Texas horizon from the bare back of a beautiful buckskin mare.
If past lives exist, then I was a bluesman/ jockey who retired to a life of fly fishing small streams, putting poetry all over watercolor paintings, and writing about the people and places I've known. I'm not sure I've been here before, but what I do know is that I've been a teacher for the past 25 years.
I've been at El Cerrito High School for most of my teaching career. El Cerrito is a working class community just north of Berkeley that serves three distinct areas. Aside from El Cerrito, which contains a large Asian and Latino population, many African-American students come from Richmond, and a small mostly white population from the affluent hill community of Kensington. I once counted 17 distinct ethnicities in one class, so trust me when I tell you I teach in a diverse community. My school, like many others, is old, physically deteriorating, a reflection of the contradictions within the community it serves, but filled with many energetic, thoughtful, altruistic, curious, students. We just converted to a Block schedule, allowing us to teach only teach 3 classes at a time. Currently I teach International Problems, Psychology and English 3 (Honors), an American literature class.
Literature forms the basis of my approach to literacy. Within that context, the borders are wide. I think we teach best what we love the most, so I welcome opportunities to bring historical perspective and personal experience to my classroom. Consequently, a typical approach for me would include music, film, or taped interviews.
I discovered after teaching a few years that I wanted to do other things as well. The trick for me has been to develop various sides of myself while still in the classroom. In the mid 1970's I worked with a group of musicians doing a performance about the life of Woody Guthrie. This evolved into a four-man show that took us all over the West coast, mostly throughout Northern and Central California. What became "An Evening With Woody Guthrie," was especially rewarding because I met many of Woody's friends and family throughout the course of our 7 year run. While I occasionally miss doing the spoken word parts from Woody's writings and playing the harmonica, I was fortunate to have another passion that led me to yet another alternate universe. After producing a radio documentary on hoboes and rail-riders, I set out to do a second show on the sub-culture of horse racing. That project developed into a series of articles about the program and the opportunity to write for The Blood-Horse magazine, the weekly bible of the thoroughbred industry. I've been the Northern California correspondent for The Blood-Horse since 1983.
My love of traditional American music and popular culture has served me well as a teacher. Yet if there is anything that has helped me motivate or light a spark in anyone it is my emotional nature. I'm passionate about the things I love, and while that passion often collides with sentimentality or even nostalgia, I'm fortunate that most students see it as authentic. I try to build a community within my classroom. That community shares ideas and writing, confronts issues, even when fearful or painful, and hopefully, understands that in writing, we quite literally save our lives.
Email: BruceG4747@aol.com
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