EASTHAM — Anyone who has ever been a student will tell you that some courses seem inseparable from their teachers. But Lisa Brown, who teaches Nauset Regional High School’s Exploring and Respecting Differences (EARD) courses, insists that hers can be.
When Brown retires at the end of this year after 25 years at Nauset, the school administration must decide if EARD, EARD II, and the honors compendium known as HEARD will outlast her. The school’s principal, Patrick Clark, did not return a call seeking comment.
Nauset Regional School Committee Chair Chris Easley hopes the courses will continue. “No program has affected that school’s culture more than EARD,” he said. “It is worth its weight in gold.”
Brown’s classes are electives that begin with exploration of an attention grabber for most teenagers: cliques. The curriculum segues into stereotypes, explicit bias, the formation of hate groups, and cults. “This is where it gets dicey and really cool and fun,” Brown said.
They take on gender and sexuality. “That whole section — I let the kids teach it now,” said Brown, who is gay.
Her one interjection is to show the students a few ads from the 1950s, including one with a woman’s head superimposed on a bearskin rug. “A man is stepping on her,” Brown said. The ad is selling shoes. “We look at the intrinsic and extrinsic implications of sexualizing, humiliating, and debilitating one whole half of our population for many, many years.”
EARD II covers the Black Lives Matter movement, human trafficking, and mediation, said Ali Hawk, a junior from Orleans who has taken every course Brown offers. Through Brown’s advanced courses, Hawk has become a student mediator and presents twice-monthly seminars on empathy to 90 middle-school students at a time. The skills she honed don’t just look good on a college application, Hawk said. “They matter to me personally. You learn a lot in Lisa’s classes that you would not normally be taught in a classroom but that you really should be taught.”
Sophomore Lily Rice of Truro takes a class called Study Strategies with Brown. “Not only does she have energy that is off the charts,” said Rice, “she doesn’t look at kids as ‘problem’ kids.” Brown, she said, sees students’ potential “if only someone believes in them — and she is the one who believes. She is the first person I go to if I need advice.”
Many of Brown’s students are members of the school’s Human Rights Club, which Brown advises. Until 2018, Brown traveled to Haiti with some of her students and artist Ellen LeBow, who helped build an arts center there in the 1990s. In the summer, Brown still takes students to the Hague Global Student Leaders Summit where they once heard Greta Thunberg speak.
EARD is not a how-to on becoming a political activist, said Brown. The point, she said, has always been to inspire students’ interests.
When Brown left restaurant ownership — she had opened the Flying Fish in Wellfleet with Pat Foley in 1990 — and began teaching special education at age 40, her students were near dropouts, she said. Keeping them in school was her sole focus.
“I used current events and the injustices that they were experiencing to hook the kids in a meaningful way,” said Brown, now 65.
Two years later, she began teaching EARD as an elective, and students with a wide range of interests signed up. Brown has a degree in ethnomusicology from Hampshire College and also taught World Music at Nauset until 2008.
She grew up in Wellfleet and still lives in her childhood home. She credits her career success to Wellfleet Elementary School fifth-grade teacher Barbara Winslow. “She was a poet,” Brown said. “Frankly, I had a massive crush on her.”
Eager to please on her first book report for Winslow, Brown read The Hobbit in a single weekend (it was easy, she said, given that her parents had already read it to her). But when she told Winslow, the teacher said, “I think you skimmed it. Go back and find me the longest sentence in the book.”
Brown said it took her another week and a half to find that sentence, on page 17, which she recited from memory for a reporter: “By some curious chance one morning long ago in the quiet of the world, when there was less noise and more green and the hobbits were still so numerous and prosperous, and Bilbo Baggins was standing in his door after breakfast smoking an enormous long wooden pipe that reached nearly down to his long woolly toes (neatly brushed), Gandalf came by.”
What Ms. Winslow taught her, she said, is that a good teacher can help students do just about anything they set their minds to. Brown’s students have done a lot; each year, the Human Rights Club has lunch with legislators on Beacon Hill, where the students are recognized on the floor of the Senate and get to talk about the issues that matter to them. “I cry every single time,” Brown said.
In 2018, the right-wing group United Cape Patriots showed up at Nauset High School to protest at a forum her students were holding on a Saturday about a ballot question known as “the transgender bathroom bill.” One member of that group carried a sign that read “Safety Trumps Diversity” and depicted a transgender person with horns and a tail. The figure had a big slash through it, Brown said.
“There were kids who were afraid to leave the auditorium,” Brown recalled. “There were parents who were saying this is not safe. We circled up and everyone held hands. I said, ‘We can do this.’ ”
MacKenzie “Mac” Bell, 24, of Harwich, who graduated from Nauset in 2018, said Brown inspired him to pursue filmmaking when she assigned him to produce a documentary on their trip to the Hague leadership summit. She bought the camcorder.
Brown encouraged Bell to attend Hampshire College where he is now a senior studying film. “Hampshire students pave their own path,” he said. “That is why I love Lisa so much. She instilled this sense of path-making for yourself, taking your own trail, and making an impact.”
