Codger’s column: Meet Mr. Miedema
For some time, Codger has had his eye on Peter Miedema, which is not easy.
He’s never still. He pops up in the classroom as Shelter Island’s social studies teacher, in the gym as basketball coach, on field as baseball coach, last summer as a Havens Market manager, and this summer at Sylvester Manor Farm as assistant groundskeeper.
He says he believes in working hard and getting dirty. He looks like a competitive weightlifter, which he is.
Two years ago, Miedema got national attention when he banned cell phones in his classroom. He told Julie Lane: “Things don’t stick when you’re not paying attention. You cannot learn at the same time you are looking at other information.”
But it was, of course, the coach/social studies teacher combo that drove Codger to Miedema’s airy third-floor classroom last week. Was he the local version of Tim Walz, the supposedly “radical liberal” Democratic vice-presidential candidate?
Miedema gives Codger the side-eye.
“I don’t think it’s liberal to want to do right by the kids, to keep ‘em safe and give them a purpose when that’s your job. You can’t learn if you’re hungry or tired or scared, if you’re not challenged to try harder, to rewrite, to think more.
“I don’t tell them what to think, the world according to Miedema. I start by asking what they want in life. They want a job when they finish school, a lot of them want to buy a house on the Island. And they don’t think it’s going to happen. Why?
“So we talk about politics and business, how could George Santos get away with what he did for so long? We talk about the spoils system in party politics and we make connections.
“A few years ago more than a thousand people died in the collapse of several Bangladesh factories. A lot of kids don’t know where Bangladesh is even though it makes their shoes. My girlfriend, who is in fashion, has been there, so we talk about the conditions there and that gets us back to history, to the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York where more than a hundred workers died, mostly because the owners had locked them in the building. It led to a lot of worker safety laws.”
This was on a cloudy afternoon two weeks before school was scheduled to start again. Codger was sitting in a student chair, facing a jigsaw puzzle of Republican presidents and a large picture of Miedema posing with Joe Namath at Isola.
Miedema was at his desk, bouncing with energy. After two-and-a-half hours, Codger thought the man should be wired to a generator providing energy to the rest of the Island, especially Town Hall. How’d he get like that?
He grew up in Kerhonkson, NY, the youngest of four, working on the dairy farm of his mother’s father. His father, a Dutch immigrant, also worked on other farms and at Agway.
“Growing up, I knew what it was like living paycheck to paycheck and I sat next to the kids of migrant laborers who lived in chicken coops and came to school hungry. We got to be friends through sports. Most of them would be gone by November, off to other jobs.”
Miedema says he was close to joining the Marines after high school, but his mother, upset by what Vietnam service had done to his uncle, talked him out of it.
Inspired by his sister to become a teacher rather than a farmer, he earned a BS in secondary education from SUNY New Paltz and a Masters in educational psychology from the College of Saint Rose.
For half-a-dozen years he taught disruptive and disabled kids, a further education. As he told Charity Robey five years ago, “I had to adapt because these kids were not going to. I couldn’t just stick a textbook at them, and say do your work. They were acting out because they couldn’t read, they couldn’t do their work.”
He came to Shelter Island 17 years ago, first to coach – “I’m old school, I tell them, make the effort, get better, you’ll win.” – then to teach social studies as well.
“Shelter Island’s a rich place, but you’d be surprised how many poor kids live here. They know if they come back here to live, it might be working at the hotels and restaurants, with no guaranteed house. Kids talk about that in class and that leads to more history, the Gilded Age, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and now we have Amazon and kids their age working in meat-packing plants. My job is to make them aware of the issues and be informed.”
Maybe his job, as immediate past president of the local Lions Club, is also to be a VPOTUS in waiting.
