SYRACUSE, N.Y. - Ryan Elsenbeck, stabbed twice by a student while working as a substitute in Syracuse, refuses to give up on teaching.

The 24-year-old is still recovering from stab wounds to the chest and arm that he suffered trying to break up a fight May 25 in a Corcoran High School hallway.

He can't quite play his guitar like he used to, or give a thumbs up. His hand gets tired just from writing his signature. Doctors are working to determine whether he'll regain full use of his right arm.

But Elsenbeck's spirit hasn't been dampened. Being stabbed inches from your heart puts things in perspective, he said.

He worries more about damage to the school's reputation than his own injuries. In the aftermath, he's been disgusted by racist, dehumanizing comments he's heard about students, and outraged that his misfortune has been used to demonize the kids he loved to teach.

The 24-year-old East Syracuse Minoa graduate has never been more certain about his future as a high school English teacher.

"It's hard for me to be discouraged after this," he said. "I'm just so glad to be alive."

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Elsenbeck said he was on the way to the bathroom that Thursday around 10:30 a.m. when he came across the fight in the hallway and tried to intervene.

Within moments, he felt the wind knocked out of him and stumbled away from the fight.

Police later arrested Zhauntina Hayes, 17, in connection with the stabbing.

Elsenbeck said he didn't realized he'd been injured until someone yelled "blood!" It took him a moment to see the stab wounds on his chest and arm.

School security responded quickly, he said. Another teacher helped him down to the floor.

Elsenbeck was released from the hospital later that day. The history teacher he was filling in for was his first visitor.

Syracuse Superintendent Jaime Alicea and police chief Frank Fowler also dropped in to see how he was doing. He had to shake hands lefty because of his injuries.

Principal John Rivers later called to tell Elsenbeck he's a hero. Teachers and classes sent cards and a banner with dozens of signatures.

The girl who was being assaulted before Elsenbeck stepped in sent him a letter. Her family also sent a get well card.

A knife wound on substitute teacher Ryan Elsenbeck's arm. Elsenbeck was stabbed a month ago trying to stop a fight between two teenage girls at Corcoran High School.

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Before the stabbing, Elsenbeck was uncertain what he wanted to do with his life.

He described being in a kind of post-college funk, waffling between career options. He studied English and minored in education at Wells College.

Since January, when he began working as a substitute in Syracuse, he'd had a few great days at Corcoran and other city high schools. He'd hit it off with students, who were eager to take his classes. He connected with the material.

It made him want to apply to Syracuse University's School of Education, an application he's had to put off since, but plans to pick up after he's feeling better physically.

He said a lot of people have told him they understand if he never wants to be a teacher because of what happened to him. In recovery, he's had plenty of time to think about that.

If anything, he said, the stabbing has only motivated him more.

"A lot of people want to react to this but no one actually wants to do anything," he said.

Elsenbeck's upbringing taught him differently. The son of a teacher and a police officer, his instinct is to run into the chaos to help solve a problem, not away from it.

Elsenbeck sees issues of crime and violence in the city, and discipline in the schools, as something to be solved, not just complained about.

Thinking back on what happened, he doesn't know what kind of disciplinary system could have prevented the stabbing.

In his view, the most important thing would have been for the suspect's peers to intervene, to tell her whatever beef she was trying to resolve wasn't worth taking a life or ruining hers over.

Elsenbeck acknowledges there are more fights and more violence in Syracuse city schools than at ESM where he graduated.

"I think everyone can agree there is a lot of work to do. But I think you need to ask yourself are you willing to do something?"

That's the same philosophy that drove him to wedge himself between two flailing students to break up a fight in the first place.

He said some have questioned whether he should have intervened, but he didn't give it a second thought.

"You're not just going to sit there and watch some poor student get beaten to a pulp," he said. "I couldn't imagine being at ESM and a teacher watching a fight go down and saying I'm going to walk away."

Elsenbeck sees violence in city schools as a problem that people should care about fixing no matter who the victim is.

"A bunch of people in the suburbs saw one of their own get hit," he said. "How would the story have gone down if the other girl got hit? And maybe died? How would we react to that? Would we get the same amount of likes, shares, the same comment section blow-up? Or would we just get silence and the soft whisper of 'animals'?"

Elsenbeck said he feels ill-fit to resolve the issue of how Syracuse schools should handle discipline.

State officials in 2014 ordered the city school district to stop suspending students in large numbers. Syracuse had one of the highest suspension rates in the nation at the time.

Some have attributed incidents like the stabbing to the shift in discipline policy.

Elsenbeck said he doesn't think returning to a "zero tolerance" system that emphasizes suspension would be best for students, but said there are no easy answers.

"Those are the kinds of decisions I trust the superintendent to make. He's reacted well to this. He sees the problem. He knows we need a change."

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Elsenbeck returned to Corcoran recently to pick up his coffee mug and a book, "The Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang, that he was 30 pages short of finishing before the stabbing.

Elsenbeck said he wouldn't hesitate to visit or teach at Corcoran again. The notion that the building is unsafe bothers him.

In the weeks since the stabbing, Elsenbeck has had plenty of time to think about what happened, and see how his near-death experience was captured and shared on social media.

During the ordeal, everyone at the school was ordered to "stay in place" while police arrived and investigated.

Students, locked in their classrooms, communicated through Facebook. They shared photos and videos -- some of Elsenbeck bleeding on the ground -- to a SnapChat "party."

A photo of victim Ryan Elsenbeck was posted to SnapChat and circulated on social media in the days after a stabbing at Corcoran High School.

He reflected on a photograph posted on SnapChat and then widely shared. He remembers it as the moment when he, recognizing how seriously he'd been injured, wondered whether the hallway would be the last thing he'd see.

He approached the buzz among students with a sense of humor, calling the SnapChat party "the most millennial thing to do."

He did not extend such a good-natured outlook to the many commentators and critics who called students "animals" or suggested the school was so bad it be blown up.

"Do fights happen? Yeah," he said. "But you can't take that and brush it over everything else. It's ridiculous."

Elsenbeck said the stabbing was "not even remotely" representative of an average day at Corcoran.

"It sucks because one bad thing goes down and then everyone uses it to reaffirm what they want to believe."

Elsenbeck said the most thoughtful, powerful response he's seen to the stabbing comes from students.

Seniors in a theater program created a short film satirizing the community's reaction to the stabbing.

Like the students in the video, he doesn't want what happened to him to be used to make generalizations about the school and its students.

"I feel like they've been dragged through the mud because of this," he said. "They don't deserve that."

Reporter Julie McMahon covers Syracuse city schools and Syracuse University. She can be reached anytime: Email | Twitter | 315-412-1992