"There's Something About Bricker" Feature Profile!

There’s Something About Bricker

We all have it. That something. That one thing about us that no one knows or understands yet seems to consume our entire lives. It’s that pill we pop every day just to get going, or that meal we skip just to be able to look at ourselves in the mirror. For some, it’s never getting the chance to say goodbye to someone who’s already gone; for others, it’s the constant struggle to overcome prejudice and hate.


In October of 2007, Michael Bricker, a high school art teacher, asked his Photography I students to do something bold, something they probably didn’t expect to encounter when they signed up for the class, but also something “so typically Bricker.” He asked them to tell him about their somethings, to speak from their souls about the challenges they’ve overcome and bear their weaknesses and insecurities for the world to see.

“I am amazed by what they trust me with,” said the 33-year old.
And he’s right. They do trust him. In response, Bricker received a motley assortment of thoughts, ideas, poems, musings and black-and-white photographs that portrayed each individual’s sadness, shame, embarrassment or heartache. There were memories of loved ones battling deadly diseases and tears for loved ones lost too soon. Some shared personal struggles dealing with issues of race, terrorism and body images. Many wrote about just trying to fit in.

With the help of his students, faculty and community members, Bricker’s simple photography assignment grew into an engaging exhibition titled “Facing the Demons Within.” It was held in January of 2008, then featured and published in Life Images magazine that summer. Most of the participants were nervous, anxious as to how their stories would be received once under the scrutiny of the public eye, but Bricker continued to urge them to open up, to be proud to say “This is me! This is what I’m going through. Tell me about you.”

“I think it was a tough project just because it was so in touch with our emotions. People cried during class, and some didn't even want to share the progress of their project. I don't think it was as hard for me, because a lot of others shared the same fear that I did, even if it wasn't the basis of their project,” said Carleigh Williams, a student who participated in the “Demons” assignment her senior year of high school.


It may be that he’s the type of person who notices you, who can get you to notice you, or it may be that he’s so willing to understand what makes us all tick, but there’s no doubt that there’s an extra something about Bricker.


He teaches drawing and painting and photography. He coaches varsity tennis and Junior Varsity women’s basketball. He is a son, a husband and a youth adviser at his church. But, when it comes down to it, Bricker doesn’t consider himself to be a person who teaches one subject or another. First and foremost, he teaches kids.

“It is that hat that I am most proud of in my life,” he said. I have wanted to be a teacher since I first realized my parents were teachers when I was a couple of years old.”

Because Bricker places precedence on things like education, family and friends, and he’s definitely not the person who’s caught in a place that he doesn’t want to be. In fact, the days he dreads coming into work are “few and far between.”

“I actually enjoy being around teenagers and believe in them and want to encourage their dreams,” he said.

When a student in his sixth period drawing and painting class began to fall behind in his work, Bricker spent time with him after school to offer his guidance and support. When students began bombarding him with requests for letters of recommendations to prospective colleges, Bricker answered every single one. When he noticed that some students seemed too advanced for his Photography I course, he designed and proposed a Photography II course specifically to fit their needs.

“He was always the teacher that got on your case, but not in a bad way. Only in the way that if you needed him, he was there,” said Sarah Prall, a senior at Shippensburg University who never had Bricker as a teacher, but knew him well.


On a typical Wednesday morning at 7:30, Bricker enters through the front doors of Central Dauphin High School in Harrisburg where he has been employed for nearly five years. The excitement of yet another successful homecoming weekend lingers in the lobby, and his egg shell-white and baby blue-striped shirt and khaki slacks contrast a sea of green and white posters, banners, sweatshirts and bags. The sluggish line of growling buses has just begun to crawl away as students and faculty bustle in from their morning commutes. Bricker briefly adjusts his black-framed glasses and straightens his collar before grabbing his daily stack of mail from the front office, sliding it between the leather pockets of his laptop case and preparing for the traffic jam of teenagers that has been steadily growing at the mouth of the cafeteria.

After he pauses to let those racing to reach their lockers or visit the ladies room before the late bell rings scurry by, Bricker reaches Room 902. Unlike most high school classrooms, there isn’t a textbook in sight. There are no maps or globes of posters with periodic elements and quotes from dead presidents. In fact, if you were trying to study for a calculus exam seventh period or write a history essay on the ancient Mayans, this classroom would be downright distracting.

That’s because it is a room for welcoming, building and strengthening creativity, not copying lectures and memorizing dates. The tables are smudged with thick lines of graphite and charcoal, the stools fingerprinted with creamy pastels and colored chalk. The sinks are lined with acrylic-caked cardboard palettes and worn-handled paintbrushes, the cabinets packed with assorted scrap papers, burlap canvases and silky linens. Figure drawings and still-lifes line the walls where diagrams and pie charts should be, and several wooden easels arranged in a circular formation take the place of miniature desks and hard-seated chairs.

Bricker can tell you how to best go about drawing an accurate self-portrait or the exact chemical properties of photographic emulsion, but he never wants those to be the only things that define his work. He uses art (any kind, really) as a sort of therapeutic outlet from a world that can often seem confusing and intimidating. His assignments aren’t necessarily about drawing or painting or developing a roll of film, they are really expressive tasks that allow students to flex their creativity and escape to another place. No matter the guidelines, they always carry the same message: I believe in you.

But in this day and age, it’s hard to teach any other way.

“I have seen so many things in my classroom,” said Bricker. “I can only imagine what goes on when our students walk out the school’s doors.”

Bricker has held a student in his arms after she told him of her mother’s death, has brought another to his brother’s gravesite after that student opened up to him about a similar situation. He has encouraged one to face her eating disorder head-on and helped place her in professional care, all the while reminding her—now that she is a successful college student—that she is welcome to call him any time. He has patiently listened as a teenage boy vividly described the horrific torture of addiction, and given his best advice to a young girl who wondered how to explain to her parents that she was pregnant by a boy she wasn’t even allowed to see. He has pounded his fists on his desktop after students have walked out of his classroom, then driven home wondering why the world is the way it is.

But he has also witnessed kids getting into colleges they never believed would accept them, posed for photographs at proms and homecoming dances, grinned proudly from the stage at numerous graduations and received unexpected contact from students he never knew he reached.
Because Michael Bricker is not just a high school art teacher. He is also an adviser, a parent, a son, a sibling, a husband, a guidance counselor, a confidant, a psychologist, a doctor, a nurse and a probation officer all in one.

He is someone who can take that something we fear and hide behind and turn it into something that helps us overcome our challenges and mature and grow as human beings.

“Because each and every one of us has their something or somethings,” wrote Bricker in his contribution to the “Demons” exhibition. “That is what connects each and every one of us. And that is what keeps us alive.”