Teacher uses his brutal experience to help youngsters on The Murfreesboro Post

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Teacher uses his brutal experience to help youngsters

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By: MICHELLE WILLARD, Post Staff Writer

Posted: Sunday, July 5, 2009 8:13 am

Teacher uses his brutal experience to help youngsters | Schools, Gregrhi Love, Authors, Child abuse

Greg Love uses his experiences as an abused child to reach out to his troubled students. Love recently released a book detailing his abusive childhood and how it helps him in the classroom. Photo/ Jude Ferrara.

Greg Love’s childhood was nothing short of brutal.

The formative years of his life were spent with his heroin-addicted mother, Debbie, and her abusive boyfriend and drug supplier, Bobby, in Bridgeport, Conn.

Bobby took pleasure in giving Love pain – emotionally, physically and even sexually. He enjoyed doing anything that would hurt Love and, in turn, Debbie.

Love, 35, is just one of millions of children that have been abused. According to the Center for Disease Control, 14 percent of all children experience some type of mistreatment, whether it is abuse or neglect.

But he survived the torture and, as a teacher uses, his experiences to help kids like himself turn their own lives around.

“I am the teacher I needed when I was a kid,” Love said. “If I would have had me as a teacher when I was going through my own childhood, I think I would have been a lot better off.”

Currently an alternative behavior teacher at Walter J. Baird Middle School in Lebanon, the Murfreesboro resident spent several years working for Rutherford County Schools and Murfreesboro City Schools after graduating from MTSU.

Child abuse and his experiences are something he talks openly about daily in his classroom for students with behavior issues.

“I break it down to them, even if it is a very G-rated level. … I just say that I understand,” he said, adding it helps his students relate to him if they know his story.

Love said his students have emotional and behavioral problems often related to abuse and neglect – two problems he knows very intimately.

“This is a huge problem and I’ve always wanted to bring more attention to the cause of child abuse prevention and I want people to understand the child abuse,” Love said.

It was this desire that drove him to write a book about his experiences and how they made him the man and teacher he is today.

The book, “There is an Urgency,” was published and released recently after years of work by Love to get his story down on paper.

“I’ve been trying to get this story out for more than 20 years and I’ve known longer than that I was going to write it,” Love explained.

He first started working on the book because of anger issues and severe panic attacks stemming from his abusive past.

He said writing the book brought all the experiences of his youth back to the forefront and he relived them as he wrote the book.

“When it was done, … I sat there and felt at peace with myself, with everything, and it was beautiful,” Love said.

But he didn’t write the book for himself, he wrote it for the same reasons why he became a teacher: to help children.

“This (abuse) is an extremely huge problem that people only talk about in hushed tones and I wanted it to be something people could talk about openly and say we need to address it,” he said.

Because he addresses it openly in the classroom, his students are better able to deal with their own problems.

Love explained his class is for children whose behavior and emotional issues can’t be addressed in the average classroom.

“So I provide the time, the attention, the care that is really needed to make children successful,” he explained, “to give them the tools … so they can go back in the regular program and be successful.”

His peers said they appreciate his work when he was named system-wide Teacher of the Year for 5th-8th grade teachers from the Lebanon Special Schools District. Love will represent the system in the Tennessee Teacher of the Year competition.

Love garnered teacher of the year because so many of his students were released from his classroom and returned to the general education program.

“I didn’t know people knew what I did much less that I did a good job. …” he said. “It was really nice to be recognized for that.”

Michelle Willard can be contacted at 615-869-0816 or mwillard@murfreesboropost.com.

More info …
There is an Urgency by Gregrhi Love
can be found locally at Barnes and Noble Booksellers in The Avenue
On the Web at www.thereisanurgency.com

Love will sign copies of his book
At 2 p.m. Saturday, July 25 at Barnes and Noble

Tagged under Authors, Child abuse, Gregrhi Love, Schools

Member Opinions:

By: Jessy on 7/16/09
It is unfortunate that city schools did not appreciate his service in our system. Mr Love is a passionate educator, who would have been a terrific asset to Murfreesboro City Schools. Unfortunately city schools politics-as-usual was not his thing.