Classroom bullies are familiar to students and teachers alike. For Margaret Milardo, an educator and author of a new novel, Brandi, both warranted further exploration.
Throughout her extensive teaching career, Milardo encountered many student bullies, as well as other troubled adolescents who ran away from home or got into trouble. Once she got to know them, however, she often discovered that they had been abused by parents or lived in foster care, and had their own stories.
It was this experience that inspired her to attempt her first novel.
“I just saw some things I wanted to write about,” said Milardo, who taught kindergarten to grade 12 over 25 years at schools in Michigan, Ohio, Georgia, Connecticut, Massachusetts and, eventually, at SAD 6 and SAD 57 (Bonny Eagle and Waterboro school districts) in Maine. For the past 12 years, she has been teaching writing at St. Joseph’s College of Maine in Standish.
Brandi was published last year by Evening Street Press of Columbus, Ohio. The novel is based on her experiences teaching adolescents with tough family lives or drug and alcohol abuse problems.
“Being around the students I think is what inspired me to write about them,” said Milardo.
The novel focuses on Brandi, a teenager who struggles through school, her drug abuse problems and fighting which lands her in juvenile detention centers. As she gets into increasingly worse situations, she receives help from community members, and she begins to reevaluate her life.
Although Brandi is about adolescents, it is not geared exclusively toward teenagers. She hopes the story imparts a broader message.
“You can have your doubts about people, but everybody has value,” she believes. “It takes a lot of people and sometimes luck to help a bad student become successful.”
Milardo lives in Hollis during the academic year and owns a summer home on Little Diamond Island in Casco Bay where she does a lot of her writing. She has been going to the island for about 12 years, and has become involved in the community. During the interview, Milardo got up to answer a phone call about a community dinner. Every Saturday night during the summer, the Little Diamond community holds a dinner hosted by a different family. That’s just one of the things she enjoys about her summer residence.
“It’s just a great place to have,” Milardo said of her island home. “When you’re on an island you’re more attentive to people. There’s just something special about living on an island.”
Milardo says one of the biggest differences she finds between teaching high school and college students is their motivation to learn. In college, she said, “The students want to be taking the classes. They are more enthusiastic and happier to be there.”
But her years working with adolescents revealed a common misperception.
It wasn’t just the “bad” or troubled kids who didn’t want to be in the classroom. “Everyone always thinks it’s the kids at the bottom. It can be kids at the top, too.”
For teachers, what’s going on outside the classroom is often as important as what’s going on inside, Milardo says. Teachers have to be attentive to students with problems at home—something not always obvious.
“It wasn’t like it was rampant all over the place, but you knew it was there,” Milardo said. “You would hear about it. Someone wouldn’t be in school and you’d hear what happened. It was a slow awareness.”
Although teachers and school officials often are expected to provide support services, Milardo believes that communities are the entity that can best help a struggling person or student, an idea familiar to those who live in small island communities.
“Sometimes people having great difficulty really turn around their lives with help from the community,” she says. “Very few kids can make it completely on their own. There’s usually always somebody who plays a major role in helping a kid achieve success.”
Milardo has been working on the Brandi novel for about 10 years. She is currently working on another novel that she says is “loosely a sequel.”
More information can be found at Milardo’s website brandinovel.com