I’m lucky to have grown up and graduated from East Grand Rapids (EGR) High School in West Michigan. EGR is a walkable community with great schools, great teachers, and reasonable class sizes. Most of my 1988 classmates liked the high school experience. While we’re spread across the country, busy with life and family, many of us remain close. To help us keep in touch, our class hosts reunions every 5 years, and the EGR Schools Foundation magazine and its social media aid our efforts.
Did you know that the movie American Pie was written by an EGR graduate and is based on our high school? It’s Hollywood exaggerated, of course. However, as captured in the movie, we were a social group and spent a lot of time outside on Reeds Lake, at Lake Michigan’s beaches and cottages, and going to MSU games.
Being outside was important to my classmates. It was also a favorite pastime of one of my favorite teachers, Mr. Herbert Brenner. Mr. Brenner loved the outdoors and spent his summers in the Upper Peninsula. He talked about his cottage, the quietness of the UP, and how it allowed him to read endlessly. When he got back to school, he brought his hunting and fishing stories, which made you want to get outside.
For a high school English teacher, engaging and energizing students is a tough gig, but he made it extremely enjoyable and memorable. His focus was creative writing, literature, and speech. He was great at making his classes ones that you wanted to attend.
For me, the most memorable was during the time we read Walden. Instead of only reading the book, he made us live it. One spring day, instead of meeting in the classroom, he required us to “go outside and learn and live.” So, we headed out to the West side of Reeds Lake, a marshy area that feels very remote for suburbia.
Each afternoon for a week, our class scattered into the woods and found a spot to plant ourselves, far away from each other. We all went back to our same spots each day. Mine was on the fallen branch of an old oak tree. Our assignment was to write down what we would hear, see, smell, and how each made us feel. He wanted detail and for us to describe exactly the moments we experienced.
At the end of the week, he anonymously read everyone’s work aloud. This project was a great connector. While each student had a similar setting, how we each captured the experiences was unique and meaningful to each person. I still have my paper from my time outside.
I’m proud to have had a class with Mr. Brenner. When my classmates learned that he passed away in March at 90 years old, it hit some of us harder than we thought. He left a big impression on the students of EGR and inspired us to be creative, love writing, and go outside. While it likely wasn’t his style of creative writing, maybe it was his inspiration that drove Adam Herz to write American Pie.
