Dial, October 2008: Despite Tough Times, Seth Karpinski Is Wicked Happy Coaching and Teaching

After toying with the idea of entering the Navy for flight training, Mr. Karpinski decided to expand on his newly found love of physics and head to Columbia University, where he studied mechanical physics with a focus on fluid dynamics. Mr. Karpinski’s professor invited him to join the Ph.D. program, but Mr. Karpinski turned him down. “I told him that I wanted to teach,” Mr. Karpinski said. “He wasn’t too thrilled about that.”

“The reason I was drawn to teaching?” Karpinski settles back in his chair a little bit and runs his hand through his hair. “Well, it’s a story.”

“I grew up in the quintessential cookie-cutter town of Dalton, Massachusetts—you can Google it; it’s about this big,” Mr. Karpinski said, holding his thumb and index finger about half an inch apart and laughing. “Dalton was complete with white picket fences, beautiful churches, and the incredible backdrop of the Berkshire Mountains.

My high school was a seven town regional school, and a lot like Hackley in the sense that people traveled long distances to come together in one place, which gives you an idea of how sparsely populated our area was. The school was a good school, had a good reputation, but my class had a rough go of it.”

It all started two days after graduation, when Mr. Karpinski’s classmate Jeff Johnson committed suicide. “Jeff, who was a pretty quiet kid, came to school in sixth or seventh grade. School wasn’t really his thing, but that was ok. He acted up a bit and used to get sent to the principal’s office, but overall he was a genuine, nice kid. But, when graduation came, he wasn’t graduated, and my classmates and I received our diplomas without him.”

Newly minted graduates, Mr. Karpinski and his classmates thought they were getting on with their lives. “We all had these big plans of going to college and changing the world, and this was our big break. And then, to get that news, it just suddenly grounded us. It made us suddenly realize that maybe what we were feeling at that moment was not what everyone else was feeling,” he said. “This was the culmination of our high school career, and to end in suicide, that says a lot about how you feel in high school.”

Mr. Karpinski began to reflect on what he got out of high school and how he felt during that time. A self-described “Joe High school kid,” Mr. Karpinski was captain of three varsity sports, president of his class, and among the top ten students in grade-point average.

“I had my hand in everything,” he said. “Parents looked at me and said, ‘That kid is going places. Look how happy he is, look how he’s doing all these things.’ But in retrospect I really wasn’t happy. And at graduation it’s easy to say it was great. It’s easy to say, ‘yeah, that was fun, and now I can go and conquer the world.’

But Jeff ’s death made me look back, remember, and say, ‘You know what? I really disliked high school. I disliked so much about it. I disliked the stress, the politics, and the pressure. A lot of people, especially our parents, say that high school is the best time of our lives. But when I looked back, I saw that it was a pretty miserable experience.” Jeff was the first one to go. And then during Mr. Karpinski’s first year at Bates, he received a call from his mother, telling him that a drunk driver had killed Justin Farrell in a car crash.

“Justin was on my running team, and he lived in my town. The thing with Justin was, he kind of fell through the cracks in high school. All his friends were smart kids who went off to college and moved on, but Justin stuck around. He was depressed after they left, so much so that he got involved with drugs, and began dealing cocaine, which in Berkshire County never happens,” he said. “He was just a really sad kid. And this again is just right after high school, and shows that maybe high school isn’t just this little utopia or paradise.”

The third tragedy of Mr. Karpinski’s graduating class attracted press coverage from a variety of national sources, including Rolling Stone magazine. Brian Johnson lived 200 yards away from Mr. Karpinski’s house.

The young Seth Karpinski had gone to Brian’s middle-school birthday parties, played weekend football with him, and was taught by Brian’s father. Brian was an integral part of Mr. Karpinski’s childhood, and a big part of the community.

After a rough time in high school, Brian scraped into a college in Hawaii, where he got involved with drugs. “The drug use got to the point where Brian called his dad and said, ‘You need to buy me a ticket to come home right now or I’m going to die,’” Mr. Karpinski said. “When he got back to town, he was going to community college, but he was drinking a lot and was not very happy. And then, out of the blue, Brian started buying guns. Nobody in Dalton needs a gun. I talked to some people who were home and they all told me, ‘Brian is going off the deep end.’”

Brian’s best friend was named Dave Sullivan. Mr. Sullivan, who was attending University of Massachusetts, was captain of the football team, and while “rough around the edges,” was a genuinely nice guy, according to Mr. Karpinski. “He got to college and decided to turn his whole life around. He decided to really apply himself, and he was engaged to a great girl he was completely crazy about. And then one night, Brian called up Dave and asked him to go out drinking with him. Dave told him he was sorry but that he had an exam coming up and that he was hanging out with his girlfriend that night. Brian called again, asking him to go out, and Dave said no. Brian got into his car and drove to Dave’s house. He walked up to Dave’s room where he was sitting doing homework, pointed his shotgun at Dave’s head, and killed him. Point-blank. And they were best friends.”

Mr. Farrell went to jail, and there was a funeral for Mr. Sullivan. All these things happened while Mr. Karpinski was still fresh out of high school. “Eight percent of my graduating class is dead from murder or suicide. Which is absurd—I’m twenty six.”

Mr. Karpinski looks up as he says, “There were so many kids going through pain and stress in high school. A majority of my teachers were indifferent to their students. For them it was just a job. But there was one teacher that I will always remember, my gym teacher, because he would ask how I was doing and genuinely mean it. Without certain people like that, maybe I wouldn’t have ended up like I am. I got really lucky.”

Mr. Karpinski can count on one hand the bad days he’s had as a teacher. “My interaction with my students, both academically and as a coach, lets me get to know them on a real level. And that is so important to me. I’m twenty-six years old, and it’s amazing that I have found something I love so much.”