by J. Thorn
While this ticket stub is from the Dr. Feelgood tour of 1989–1990, my first concert was the Mötley Crüe show in 1984, the Shout at the Devil tour. And it’s that legendary tour that spawned my “first concert” story.
I was thirteen, and my brother was ten, which meant my parents would not allow us to go without one of them. I guess my dad drew the short straw, because he drove us to the Pittsburgh Civic Arena. I must begin by saying, that to this day, I have never heard my dad drop an f-bomb. His favorite expression of exasperation is “What the suck?” My brother and I now say this to each other (when Dad is not around) all the time. I knew from the moment we pulled into the parking lot that I was in for a bizarre mix of pre-teen titillation and an all-out shamefest while walking next to my dad and my little brother. There was enough Aqua Net and reefer smoke in the air to give anyone a decent contact high. When we got into the arena, Dad (still being a good sport) purchased us a Mötley Crüe headband and an official program. I still have the former, but not the latter. The opening act was Y&T, and they began their set in total darkness. Lead singer Dave Meniketti stepped up to the microphone to rip into “Summertime Girls” and shouted, “Okay ‘summertime girls,’ let me see your big fucking titties!” I didn’t want to look my dad in the face, but I couldn’t stop myself. He stood there, stoic and unmoving as if someone had raised an American flag over Iwo Jima. The rest of Y&T’s set continued as you would expect, with pyrotechnics and forced sing-alongs. When the boys in the Crüe took the stage, you know what song I wanted to hear, and damn if they didn’t open the show with it. Hearing that riff in an arena full of people fist-pumping and screaming “Shout, shout, shout at the devil” made me forget my old man was standing next to me.
I don’t remember much else from that night. My dad never spoke of it, and in a strange coincidence, 1985 was the year I became old enough to attend rock concerts without parental supervision.
1990
My mother despised my earrings, my music, and my long hair. She’d threaten to cut it off in my sleep (hair, not ears). I think she hated knowing that friends and neighbors in church would see me walking down the aisle for communion and whisper to their spouses, “Honey, isn’t that the Thorn boy? My God, look at his hair. That just screams poor parenting.” Today, she has more tattoos than I do. Go figure.
For the memorable The Razor’s Edge tour, the boys in the band loaded up on Angus dollars and dropped them from the rafters during “Money Talks.” The bill you see is the one I grabbed after elbowing a young girl in the nose for it.
1991
All true metalheads have seen Metallica at least once in their lives. While I thought the band was hungrier when I saw them three years prior, on Van Halen’s Monsters of Rock tour, the Black Album tour in 1991 will go down as the loudest show I have ever attended. I don’t know the number of tractor trailers they brought on tour or how many stacks of amplifiers were on stage, but I can tell you that I seriously thought Kirk’s feedback made me deaf. I spent the next week yelling at people, and I’m thankful that my ears still work today. I can safely say that this show marked a transition for me, a moment in time when seeing the performance became more important than seeing the cleavage at the performance.
1992
1992 was another vintage year of concerts for me. Let’s see, what happened in 1992. I was born in 1971, carry the four. . . .Hmm. Not sure why the glut of parties in 1992, but it did seem to be another blur of live entertainment from the jammy sweetness of the Allman Brothers Band to the metal/rap hybrid tour of Public Enemy and Anthrax. I got a pick from Scott Ian at the Anthrax show and citation for public intoxication from the Pittsburgh Police at the Allman Brothers show. The Skid Row concert was fairly forgettable except for the blistering opening set of a then up-and-coming band by the name of Pantera.
I find it necessary to break out the Lollapalooza show from the rest I attended that year. The sets by Lush, Jesus & the Mary Chain, Ministry, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Pearl Jam, Ice Cube, and Soundgarden were some of the most eclectic and amazing I’ve ever seen. Pearl Jam stole the show as Ten was breaking in the summer of 1992. I went with my trusty concert-going buddy Jeff and his slowly deteriorating Datsun 210. This time, we brought along a real, live woman. It was a first for us but not happenstance. And no, we did not drug her or pay her to come along. In a way, I feel a bit guilty, because I ditched Jeff for the majority of this show to hang with the girl. She had long, dark hair and a wicked smile. I remember her standing underneath the water mist station, running her hands through her hair as other men stumbled into each other trying to catch a glimpse. I still have the shirt that I wore that day, and whenever I wear it now I mention Lollapalooza ’92, and we both chuckle while our kids give us strange looks.
An Interview with Don
“Master craftsman” is a term used to describe brewers, or carpenters, but not teachers. However, this term fits Don perfectly. He began his career at a private school in northern New Jersey in 1973. Don has been teaching science and coaching there ever since. His no-bullshit style is something that had a great impression on me as a new teacher in 1994. He garners the respect of his students without trying to buddy up to them. The athletic teams that Don coaches are notorious overachievers. In my last season as his assistant lacrosse coach in 1999, he guided a group of seventh- and eighth-grade boys to an undefeated season. If you think that’s hard for professionals to do, you should see how hard it is for twelve-year-olds.
Don is charismatic and engaging. He demands that others pull their weight and brings out the best in those around him. While serving as the school’s athletic director and middle school science teacher, Don is also a husband, father, Harley Davidson enthusiast, and member of a local blues band featuring another long-time teacher at the school.
While Don is reluctant to “preach,” I was able to capture his thoughts on a mild March evening.
J.: Who or what influenced your teaching style?
DON: When I look back on it, there were a lot of things that were influenced by my high school football coaches. My high school football coaches were both guys that taught according to who they were. They didn’t try to pretend to be someone else. They were honest and different. One coach was very firm, and the other one was much more compassionate and understanding. The two coaches went together well. I think I always remembered that.
J.: How does that define what kind of teacher you’ve become?
DON: My style, my personality is firm but fair. I’m the guy that right away sets the tone, and the kids respect it. A lot of people look at it as more of a fear factor, and I don’t think that’s it at all. There is a seriousness of purpose with me. There always was with my coach. By starting out that way, whenever you let down or joke around with the kids, you can pull them closer and gain their respect at the same time without becoming their buddy. So it’s a line, and I remember coach being that way. A tremendous respect, yet a lot of fun when he was joking around, and that’s where I come from.
J.: Being in the business for as long as you’ve been in it, I’m sure you’ve seen trends come and go, or educational fads. Which ones have come and gone, and which ones have stuck around or become relevant?
DON: This is a complex question because I can only speak to elementary school/middle school education. I didn’t see a great deal of change where I work, but I do remember trends during those times like the open classroom. It was my understanding that you didn’t necessarily have any grade levels or formality of teaching specific subject matter, but there was always opportunity for it. On a daily basis they would pick up wherever something seemed to be appropriate. It’s not like they would have history now or math now or English now or that type of thing. It didn’t last very long, but there might be some of that still around.
Tracking became very big before I started teaching. This was not just in math. For instance, kids were put into groupings, so you essentially had kids that were developmentally ahead all together and you had the kids in the middle all together
and those in the bottom all together. Now it’s really only seen in certain subject matters, and it’s still being debated whether or not it works.
The only trends that I saw in my years of teaching that I promoted were those in technology. I’ve been teaching for thirty-seven years, and the kids at our school have had laptops for the past eleven years. Within our school there just weren’t a lot of trends that took place. There is still a lot of debate on grouping within a school. Should schools be K-5 and then 6, 7, 8 or should the model be one like ours, which is K-4 and then 5, 6 and then 7, 8? That is still being debated as to what is the most appropriate way to group kids within the institution. Trends are not something I pay that much attention to.
J.: How do you see the craft of teaching changing over the next twenty to thirty years, or do you see it changing? Are there certain things that will never change?
DON: I’ve seen a change already with technology, and I think it’s going to change remarkably. It’s inevitable that it’s going to change. I’ve always wanted to guide the kids. I didn’t want to be the person that knew everything, and the kids ask the questions and you answer the questions. I never wanted to be that way. I wanted to ask them the questions and have them answer the questions. In the past, you didn’t have the resources that you do now with the computer. There has to be more emphasis placed on skill rather than knowledge. If you’re taking a history course, you can find out about the people and those events in seconds, and that’s true for science, too. Conceptually, you have to learn things, but I think you can learn it through analysis and being interactive with the computer. The teacher still has to be guiding in a way that the interactions are going to be fruitful. That’s what I find myself doing in class. We can cover topics so much more rapidly because we can get to information and we can analyze information on a much broader, higher scale because of the laptop. That’s what we’re doing much more now than ever before.
Although I remember hearing that from my college days, that teachers were supposed to teach kids how to think. Teaching kids how to think in 1973, when I first started, was a whole lot different than it is today. Let’s face it. We really have to understand that kids are growing up in a world that is so different and changes much more rapidly, and the worst thing we can do is to judge it as good or bad, comparing it to the way it was. One needs to identify the change, embrace it, and find out the best way to use it.
With the way the educational system is today, we’re not teaching kids how to be happy but how to survive within a system. Education could change in a very positive way. It will become more personalized. There will be 3D virtual classrooms; this is already beginning now. The teacher can see the students, and the students can see the teacher and each other in the same way they could if they were in the room together. The kids in that classroom will be from China, Japan, Germany, the Middle East, all over the world. The opportunities will be extraordinary. Personalization will mean changing things, such as the time that we teach. It won’t have to be the traditional eight o’clock to three o’clock model. That will change for the better because our educational system in the United States is set up for the working adults, not for the kids. Kids are going to school at the wrong time. We know the best time for adolescents is at night. I get emails from kids at night on a regular basis. It’s not a question of right or wrong. They have chemicals in their brains that make it tough for them to sleep. Personalization has already changed education in that my students can now contact me in a more individualized and efficient manner at any time. Just having students call on the phone, you don’t have any documentation of what went on, and you don’t have time to ponder. I get emails from kids, and I’ll ponder and think about it before replying. Learning can take place anytime, and I couldn’t do that back before we had email. Twenty to thirty years from now the opportunity for learning will expand dramatically, and the options will be more personalized. This is common practice today in higher education. Online degrees are everywhere, and many are strenuous and legitimate. We’ll see the same kind of thing work its way down. There will be other issues involving social interactions, but you face challenges with any kind of system.
J.: When you enter the profession, you’re young, excited, and the kids relate to you easily. As you get older and generational gaps appear, how do you stay relevant in the lives of the kids?
DON: When you talk to anyone, you can only relate to them through the things they’re interested in. If you don’t know the music that they’re listening to, if you don’t know the social happenings in that age group, such as entertainment, if you don’t know the sports that they follow, you can’t relate. All of this is at their fingertips. Every generation has its own language. There is a specific vocabulary that comes out of each generation, and you have got to talk their language, that’s all there is to it. When you’re older, there is still a lot of language that I grew up with that I still use, and I look a little corny using it, and using their language, but they realize that and understand that. They also understand that there’s a sincerity about understanding where they come from. When I make analogies in class, I use contemporary issues or incidents that are relevant to them. Influences on kids today are coming from the same places they did a generation ago, such as your home, your school, the media. The media has and always will be an influence. You have to study those influences and determine what’s different about them now as opposed to your own, and if you really care about the kids, you’ve got to speak their language and follow these things. My wife watches VH1 all the time and keeps me up on the current videos. So when the kids in school are talking about Lady Gaga, I know who that is (laughs).
J.: Is a private education worth the money?
DON: I get asked that about our school. If the institution has a clear mission, and sticks to it, you can fit the kid to it. That’s where it starts. If it’s a real good fit for the kids, it’s an investment that you’re making, like an insurance policy. The way the world works, it’s not what you know but who you know. The private school club works that way. The kids go to certain schools, and people within the club will give them their job when they come out. Independent schools in the United States are like that, and I’m in one of them. In a sense, the probability of them being able to eventually have a good job are more so than if they were in a public school, but that’s abstract and complex, too, because the quality of public schools varies. Essentially, money begets money, but it doesn’t necessarily mean the kids are happy. Private school education is not worth it for a kid who doesn’t fit with that school’s mission. Some private schools don’t have a strong identity; they take any kid, they take their money, and they push them through. At my school, if our kids don’t fit, we’re not going to keep them.
I talk to parents all the time about this. We have parents willing to spend twenty-five thousand dollars a year, but it isn’t as easy as it was back in the 70s. Now parents want to know what they’re getting for their money. It’s for parents that want to be more invested in their children’s education, want more ownership of it. They are more visible, more vocal than they ever were, and they have every right to be. We need to be held completely accountable for what we’re doing. The days of ‘Johnny’s teacher is right and that’s all there is to it’ are gone. You need to gain the respect of the kids and the parents, and you do that by being completely open and honest with them at all times and by being held accountable for what you do.
J.: Can you talk about making mistakes in the classroom?
DON: I can think of various incidents over the years where I messed up, but nothing that I thought was significant. What we have to keep in mind is that we have no idea how the littlest things can affect a human being, what we say or what we do. The things that I remember, whether it was coaching or in the classroom, were saying things that I thought later could really make the kid feel bad or things that could have been humiliating to them. That would stick with me, so I’d have to go back and not only apologize to them bu
t do it with the other people that were there. I’d say that ‘it was totally wrong how I said that to you,’ and the next time we were in class I’d bring it back up. I’d say, ‘what I said to Bobby over there the other day, that was totally wrong, I was out of line, and I apologize for it.’ So I’ve done some things where I’ve had to apologize to the class. I’ll never forget those incidents, and I don’t know if apologizing really makes up for it or not, but I chalk it up to being human. We all make mistakes, and I hope that when I go back and apologize that way that it would be significant to the kid as well. You’re going to make mistakes, and all you can do is try to make up for them any way that you can and move on from there.
J.: Tell me about a kid that you saw struggling or thought was never going to ‘make it’ in life, and after working with him you saw him come out the other side.
DON: My experience is so narrow because I’ve only been at one school, but the things that happen at my school happen at all schools. We spend most of our meeting time talking about the same three or four kids, and a lot of the talk about the three or four troubled kids has more to do with teachers venting because these aren’t your traditional kids that fit into the mold, and they’re more difficult to teach. I love these kids. One kid that I remember was bright and could do the work, but he never wanted to do it. He was a ‘troublemaker’ to them, so they gave him to me to try and get him through. He is extremely successful today. He went to a really nice boarding school, went on to Princeton even though teachers at our school thought he would never even go to college because of his antisocial behavior. So I’ve seen a number of kids like that, a number of kids that weren’t going to ‘successful’ in life. Two of those guys, two brothers that were that way, now own five restaurants in New York City. They are highly successful. They went to culinary school. Nobody knew what these guys would ever do, and they didn’t either. They were always very social, very likeable, always a part of anything that was going on, but when it came to hunkering down and doing your work and getting As, they weren’t like that. They were C students in our school. I can’t tell you how many of those kinds of kids have gone on to established and successful careers. I know some of these kids that are now doctors or lawyers.
