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Thank you Dr. Lupini. Thank you members of the School Committee. And thank you members of the Brookline Education Foundation for your unwavering support of Brookline teachers. Your belief in our potential to learn, so that we may better teach has given birth to innovation, collaboration and much rejuvenation of spirit. To my principal, Jim Swaim, and my outstanding Lawrence colleagues, thank you for the gift of your nomination. The generous words, and the spirit with which they were written have touched me deeply. I am truly honored to be here today to receive the Ernest R. Caverly award.
I would like to take a moment to honor my parents, Moses and Charlotte. Although they are no longer with me, I hope that in some way you can feel their presence, as I can. As first generation Chinese Americans, their courage, faith and tremendous accomplishments have shaped and sustained the path that led me here. They would have been very proud today, Mom especially – she loved stuff like this. My children, Arielle, Keith and Melanie are here today to cheer for me. A graduate of Brookline High, Arielle returned home two days ago from her first year at Cornell. Keith is finishing up his freshman year at BHS, and as an English student of award winner, Ellen Lewis, and Melanie is the last of our three, whose graduation from preschool this June will end our glorious years at the Brookline Schools Staff Children’s Center. You are three truly remarkable people, and you make my world complete. I would like to acknowledge my husband, Phil, who at the end of every day, for the past 10,837 days, has remained my greatest fan. Phil, you have stayed by my side with every step and every misstep, and I would not wish it to be any other way. I could not have become the teacher I am today without the support and love of my family.
In preparation for this day, I sought out award winners before me - friends and colleagues I most admire. “What do I need to know here?” “How do I dare talk about teaching to great teachers?” “Ten minutes is a really long time!” Surprisingly, the advice though brief, rather random, and slightly irreverent came without hesitation: “Don’t worry about the speech, nobody ever remembers what anybody says.” (That didn’t help me because I remembered most of her speech though it was given 8 years ago.) “Wear sensible shoes, my left knee shook uncontrollably the entire time.” (This is actually happening right now.) “Keep it short, tell stories, savor the respect that comes with this.” (Well okay, maybe I can do that.)
In 1984, I was two years out of college, and had just returned to the US after six months of traveling throughout Asia by myself. To my parents’ dismay I came back to Boston where Phil and I had gone to school, instead of home to New York to set roots there. I answered an ad in the Brookline Tab for a Chinese bilingual teacher at the Devotion School, my only credential being an undergraduate degree in Asian American Studies. On the day of my interview, I left the North End, where Phil was living at the time, made a right turn instead of a left and found myself heading away from Brookline on the Washington Street Bridge toward Charlestown. A New Yorker, unfamiliar with roads that go round and round rather than straight ahead, I got off the bridge and immediately got sucked into what I now know to be a rotary. Minutes after that I found that I couldn’t go around one more time, because I had a flat tire. Four hours later, I was sitting in Gerry Kaplan’s office trying to hide the grease stains on my interview skirt. (That was the last flat tire I changed.) Years later, I would stumble upon the interview notes from that day scratched in the margins of my resume, in my personnel file at Town Hall. It read: “late for interview, doesn’t believe in pullout, Mandarin speaker, not certified, hired anyway.”
And thus began one of the most exhilarating, humbling and terrifying experiences of my life. Exhilarating because I loved my work, humbling because the more I learned the less I felt I knew, and terrifying because I was in fact an imposter. I was not a trained teacher, not a native speaker of Chinese and knew only enough Chinese characters to survive one day in a Chinese second grade classroom. I wondered how long it would take for me to be fired.
My first students at Devotion were recent immigrants, grades K through 8 from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam and the People’s Republic of China, and they spoke more than six different dialects. Each night I prepared lessons with flash cards and worksheets describing sentence patterns, verb tenses, pronunciation guides. But every day, students rushed into my classroom, (a tiny, converted kitchen space) and asked instead about the origins of Halloween, why did people wear hard hats while riding a bicycle, could I help them choose English names because no one seemed to be able to pronounce or remember their Chinese ones. At noon, I would eat my lunch while driving to the high school. There, I shared a classroom with Spanish bilingual teacher, Maria Marrero, where we tutored students only a few years younger than I was at the time. Between sessions of attempting to translate George Orwell’s Animal Farm into Spanish and Chinese respectively, we chuckled often over how stereotypical our students might appear to an observer as they stared at each other from opposite sides of the room. Sometimes on weekends, Phil and I would take students roller-skating or fishing or just to Irvings to learn the names of candy bars. During the holiday season that first year, I was touched to be presented with a card signed by all my high school students. Inside the envelope was a lovely pink Hallmark special with a hint of glitter sprinkled on a bouquet of flowers. I smiled gratefully as I read the beautiful penmanship, “Merry Christmas Hsu Lao Shi!” and then the Hallmark sentiment that followed: “With deepest sympathy on the passing of your grandmother.” Needless to say we spent that weekend at CVS finding meaning in the greeting card aisle. From these students and their families, I learned how to say dinosaur and health insurance in Chinese. I saw first hand how difficult it was to find a voice in a language, culture and political system so foreign and far from home. I came closer to understanding why after all these years, whenever my parents and I watched the Olympics together on TV, Mom and Dad would cheer, “They won!” at the same moment I shouted, “We won!”
After three years, I left Devotion and BHS to study Children’s Literature at Simmons College. I vowed to my Chinese American students that I would remain vigilant in a search for reflections of their faces and experiences in the pages of books for children. I studied with the great masters in the field, Paul and Ethel Heins, Barbara Harrison, Gregory MacGuire - people who passionately devoted their lives to upholding the highest of standards in books for children. One full year later, armed with stories of heroes and heroines of every kind, and finally certified to teach, I went back to Gerry Kaplan’s office with the hopes of becoming a regular education classroom teacher. But there were no vacancies that year at Devotion and so Gerry made a call to principal Nate Purpel at Lawrence and set up an interview for me there. My interview at Lawrence was also memorable. For those of you who know Nate, you’ll remember that he never ventured far from a structural wall, and tended to shuffle slowly by, speaking as he moved to no one in particular but to anyone who may be listening. And so when he passed me and gestured ever so slightly with a tilt of his head for me to follow him, I wasn’t quite sure what to do. Wondering if he had spoken or not, I said, “Excuse me?” and strained to hear the response. I think he said, “Are you prepared for it to rain in your classroom?” as he motioned again for me to follow. Questions in this manner continued before I had even found a seat in his office. “What is the difference between a vowel and a consonant? Are you married? Who do you most admire in history?” It must not matter, I decided, in a Brookline interview if one answers questions correctly or with indignation, because I soon found myself teaching first grade at the Lawrence School.
This began the part of my life as a teacher that I think of as “Notes to Self,” a phrase which came to life for me when I saw one of my Lawrence colleagues walking down the hall with yellow post-its affixed to her forehead, and shoulder and hip. “This is the only way I’ll remember what I need to know,” she’d say. This post-it tendency seemed to aptly describe how I was learning to teach -- in a one person conversation, a solitary Q&A and many harried, late night review sessions. All mistakes led to mental post-its on what not to do again. My first Back to School Night was standing room only, as parents, step-parents, even grandparents filled my classroom. Nervous and without anything of substance to say, I ended my presentation with way too much time left for questions. The first hand up asked accusingly, “Did you tell the children that a circle does not have sides?” “Maybe,” I replied, sensing danger. “Well, you should know that a circle has an infinite number of sides, in fact it is a multi sided polygon!” As the faces of other already anxious first grade parents became even more wrinkled with worry, I quickly assured them, rather defensively, that for our first grade purposes it was sufficient to be able to identify a circle as a shape without sides. Notes to self that night included: Identify all mathematician parents before Back to School Night, never leave time for questions, don’t sound defensive even when you are.
Then there was the first day of school several years later. I wasn’t nearly as nervous as I had been in previous years. Sunlight poured in the windows and the wooden tables gave off the scent of freshly sprayed Fantastic. As families and children began to arrive, I noticed a mother in the block area rearranging the furniture. Under her arm was a rolled up carpet. Before I could introduce myself, she snapped the rug open, and laid it purposely across the floor. She pointed to her son, who looked at me expectantly, as she said, “He needs to pray here at eight o’clock every morning. Hope you can make that work.” Stunned, I said, “Well, okay, but which way is east?” As she pointed out the designated window, I vowed never to start a school year again without knowing which window in my classroom faced east.
Ten years ago, I was “finally promoted,” as my mother was fond of saying. Teaching third grade was exciting and different. I discovered that eight year olds have a tremendous capacity for learning content, for accepting and appreciating truthful feedback, and for being very funny without intending to be.
With the support of principal, Jim Smith, I was able to collaborate with educators at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and to help shape curriculum both in and out of the classroom. My “notes to self” became more public, as the privilege and responsibility of mentoring others required me to reflect aloud on my practice and articulate my intentions. Every year I face new challenges I did not anticipate, every year I wonder if I can manage the pace and keep it fresh, and every year I am thankful to work with wonderful teammates, Jeremy Ward and Sharon Kiernan.
And so 24 years after my first day in a kitchen at Devotion, I stand firmly within the sweeping circle of The Brookline Public Schools, as a teacher who has seen it rain in her classroom on more than one occasion, as a proud parent of children who thrive because of connections made with teachers and learning, and as a member of a community of people with a voting voice, who believe in what this town can accomplish and work hard to make it possible. I no longer loathe roads that are not perpendicular, but rather appreciate the revolutions a rotary allows, to go around, and perhaps around again until the way becomes clear. I trust now that in spite of looming learning expectations and state frameworks, what some students most need, and what I must provide, may not be found in lesson plans and curriculum binders. I listen carefully for the plea and the mandate found in a mother’s voice, when she asks us to embrace her child because he is different, and I pledge to try to find a way to help that child learn, facing whichever direction his sun rises. I find breathtaking possibilities in the idea that the circle in which I stand is made up of an infinite number of sides yet I will continue to push back when the complexity of a lofty concept interferes with the simplicity of learning. I cherish the respect that comes with this award, and hope never to take for granted the gift of being a teacher. Thank you.
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