St. Francis School Faculty & Staff

Brian Engel

Eighth Grade

During my four years with the Jesuits at St. Xavier High School in Cincinnati, I was taught (or trained) to question every conclusion and question every assumption. It would be safe to say that has been my guiding philosophy ever since.

Several years later, while I was a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis, I took a course entitled "Nineteenth Century Intellectual History." In that class I realized how the fields I was used to studying (literature and philosophy) interacted with history, politics, and the arts. I was hooked.

After my year at Wash. U., I decided that I was done living in the Midwest. I decided to pick up stakes and head for fairer climes, and so on my 23^rd birthday I arrived in town with my best friend (you may know him as Mr. Parker) and a U-Haul. I spent the next few years working in or managing restaurants and catering companies, meanwhile reading everything I could get my hands on and applying for jobs that would allow me to use my education. It was then that I got my "big break": a job working on editing college textbooks and scholarly (university press) works. Throughout this time I was also discovering the joys of tutoring middle school students (both from St. Francis and elsewhere). When Will Plumb announced that he was leaving the school and moving to Japan, I realized that teaching Middle School Social Studies at St. Francis was exactly what I wanted to do. Fortunately Mrs. Porter and the Board decided to give me a shot.

In my years at St. Francis I have discovered what people mean when they say that they love their jobs. The opportunity to share in the lives of students as they grow from children into teenagers is both more exciting and more challenging than I would ever have dreamed. Watching a mind develop from unquestioning acceptance to critical thinking and questioning is the greatest thrill I can imagine.

My classroom philosophy is simple: "History’s not about memorizing names and dates; it’s a collection of stories and questions that help us to understand how and why our world is the way it is." It’s this narrative, story-like aspect of history that gets the students’ attention, then that allows me to introduce them to the great debates of the past. That in turn (on a good day) causes them to think more about the world around them, and start asking questions about why things are the way they are.