A Conversation with Erika Drezner (’94)

4 October 2013

Last Week, the English Department welcomed back three alumni to discuss their career paths after Carleton. Erika Drezner ’94, Todd Drezner ’94, and Erika Leeman-Price ’94 shared their insights into finding jobs, pursuing their passions, and having a little fun after Carleton. These alumni ended up in fields as diverse as secondary education, film making, and internal medicine. Erika Drezner was gracious enough to be interviewed for the Second Laird Miscellany. She teaches English at the Berkeley Carroll School in Brooklyn.

Q. Why did you become an English major? What skills have you gained from studying literature? How have those skills influenced your career in film?

Really, I was looking for the best intellectual home. The department was terrific, and I decided that I wanted to study with these excellent professors and these smart students for the rest of my time at Carleton. I thought about geology but then realized that I do like being able to shower, and once I declared I never looked back. I love to read and write and felt lucky to do it for credit. At that point I figured my major didn’t matter to my future job–any liberal arts degree would help me–so I just decided to be happy.

Q. How did you become a teacher?

It’s funny, in retrospect my career path looks very intentional: I majored in the subject I now teach, I almost fulfilled the Educational Studies concentration, I took a job as a teaching intern in a writing class at Milton Academy the summer before my senior year, I got an English teaching internship at St. Paul’s my first year out of Carleton–but what I *thought* I was doing was letting myself season for another year or two before graduate school. And paying the bills. And having a good time in the company of teenagers.

And then gradually I just fell in love with high school teaching and high school living. I worked in a boarding school for my first four years of teaching (first St. Paul’s, then Westtown) and I can still feel my boarding school roots (which are similar to liberal arts campus roots in some ways). I tell people I raise children for a living. Talking about diversity issues with my advisees or wiping down tables after lunch side by side with the kids on duty or taking a group of kids to volunteer at the Bowery Mission–these activities are as important to me (and certainly as important to the kids) as literature and even writing. My job is to witness and support kids as they grow up.

I think some professors do that–certainly I felt that kind of mentoring when I was at Carleton–but high school teaching is self-consciously about helping kids holistically. And so I guess I chose my job for the same reasons I chose my major: I decided I wanted to work alongside a whole bunch of fantastic teachers who love to talk pedagogy and are constantly trying to figure out how to reach kids better all day long (and into the evening). In my department we talk about this as switching away from the question, “What am I teaching?” and toward the question, “What are they learning?”

Q. What was hardest about the transition from student to teacher?

Perhaps this will sound awful, but the hardest thing is that it’s not about me anymore, or about how good I am at reading and writing. I’m still doing a little English every day (see best moments below), but being really good at English is not at all the same thing as being a really good English teacher. As one of my colleagues puts it, “You can get away with teaching from a well of charisma and love of the material–but you shouldn’t.” The teaching skills I learned at Carleton that I still use every day are the skills I picked up as a tutor at the Write Place, and those skills involve listening and helping students figure out what they think and what they want.

I do miss being so excited about one of my own ideas that I fear the keyboard will burst into flame and I will vaporize before I can get it all properly written down. I certainly felt like that a few times when I was getting my masters over five summers at the Bread Loaf School of English, and I can feel like that when I design some really fantastic curriculum. And I also channel my creative energy into what writing I still do–my friend the college counselor jokes that I should bring out a greatest hits collection of my recommendation letters.

Q. What is your most memorable moment in an English class?

At Carleton: I don’t know if Tim still does this, but he used to look down at his open text while we were doing some close reading in class, holding the book in one hand and pushing his hair up out of his eyes with the other hand. Then sometimes he would look up and nod encouragingly at someone who was making a point, but he would forget to take his hand down from his hair, so he would be nodding enthusiastically with his palm on his forehead–I can show you if you’d like. Another time he was so excited by someone’s idea that he suddenly dashed off to get a source from his office, but our experience of that moment was that he looked up nodding, his hand slapped to his forehead, and then without another word ran from the room.

In my own class: I love it when a kid finds some AWESOME new connection in a text that I’m teaching. So for instance, Gatsby floating dead (spoiler alert) on his air mattress at the end is a sad and horrible echo of Daisy floating on her sofa at the beginning. Or Amy, in Beloved, has the “voice of a 16-year-old-boy” and has come up into the weeds “looking for huckleberries”–hey, wait a minute! literary allusion alert! Or Hamlet, right before his death, rather than puzzling “to be or not to be” suddenly says, “Let be.” Two tiny words buried in the “fall of a sparrow” speech, so I had never noticed them before, but there they are–he sets his most famous tension to rest. I’m not saying that these moments aren’t widely known by the experts, or that they haven’t already been published. What’s fun in high school is I don’t really have to worry about whether we’re being original. It’s just so cool when those of us *in the room* are seeing something for the very first time.

Q. What is one piece of advice you wish you would’ve received after graduating?

I’m not sure advice works. I really think we have to figure things out for ourselves or we don’t really know them. What I figured out after I graduated was, little by little, how to stop waiting around for someone to grade me, affirm me, tell me that what I was doing was okay. I was a praise addict, and I’m still susceptible to it, but I learned how to make more confident decisions and assess my own progress and decide that my life and my choices were good enough. I think those of us who do well in school–who have perhaps been keeping a secret stash of our grades and comments and beloved mentors–need to learn how to trust ourselves and know that our lives will not be earning a GPA.

Q. If you could have one Carleton related “do-over,” what would it be?

My romantic judgement was, um, shaky some of the time. Luckily I ended up with Todd, so I don’t need a do-over.

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