Every teacher's dream as Long Ago Student Reaches Out

The last time I saw her was 30 years ago. She was 12. 

We met yesterday to catch up at 11:30. Four hours later we were still talking about a million things. The past, the present and the future. Her major memory was an overnight visit to my house with four other 7th grade girls, something I would get arrested for that today.

 

 

Friday, October 11, 2024

 

About two weeks ago, I received an invitation to attend the retirement luncheon at PS 147K of the principal, Sandra Noyola but I was in the midst of a chemo session and didn't have the energy to go. Sandy has an interesting history - a student, para, teacher, principal in District 14. She told me a parent with a first grader at the school had asked her about me and I gave Sandy my email. A few days later I received am email from the student that every teacher dreams of. And I had relatively little contact with her since I was not her classroom teacher. So let me explain.

 

I have gotten together with former students before, but they were mostly from the years when I taught them in 4th, 5th and 6th grade. Any elem classroom teacher will tell you how intense living together for a year can be. But my last such class was in 1985 after 17 years of self-contained elementary school classroom teaching, the infantry of the education system. I left for a sabbatical and another year off to finish my Masters in computer science and when I came back I became a cluster teacher, a very different job and experience with students. This student had me for computer cluster at most once or twice a week. 

But we had one special project that included her and a whole bunch of girls in what we called the Girls Engineering Club at PS 147. That club came about at the inspiration of a colleague, Mary Hoffman, a great special ed teacher, a novelist and avid searcher of scientific inquiry who received a grant for closing the scientific gender gap and was looking for a project. 

 

I had been accumulating Erector Sets and Lego materials in my very large computer lab, with access to an empty room across the hall and was fooling around with early level robotics. And thus was born the Friday after school club, both Mary and I as volunteers. Jean was one of the girls, one of two Asian kids in a school that was 95% Hispanic and black. She told me today that the club gave her one of the few opportunities to bond with other students that she was missing in her regular class. 

I was a big fan of the Gilbert Erector Sets as a kid even if my parents wouldn't get me one. I was in a toy store one day in the early 1990s and saw an Erector set and noticed it was no longer Gilbert but Mecanno, a French Company with an office in the Empire State Building. So I called. A woman with a French accent picked up (I learned later she was the sister of the president of the company). I told her I was a teacher in Williamsburg and interested in using Erector Sets in my classroom and she was very interested. She said no teacher had every contacted them. A few days later she called back and said they were donating 4 sets to my classroom and they were setting up a national contest and hoped I could enter.

It was the end of the 92-93 school year and I got 5 girls from the club together and suggested they use all 4 kits to build as big a suspension bridge as they could - I thought of

the Bayonne bridge, the world's longest steel-arch bridge, as a model.

Anyway, they built the bridge,with a little bit of sagging, and graduated to 7th grade (Jean was the valedictorian) and I left for the summer. I received a call from a PR firm in the fall saying they didn't have an entry from me for their contest. The bridge was looking a bit shabby. They wanted pictures of the bridge and the girls, who were no longer in the school. So I had to track them down and get them to come after school to spruce up the bridge, fix the sag, and low and behold we won the $1500 dollar first prize and a big article in the NY Times that went viral. 

 

The PS 147 Girls Engineering Club made some national and international news and they were feted as special ceremonies at the Museum of Natural History, an evening ceremony at science event, a visit and tour of the operations at the George Washington Bridge and an invitation to the Sally Jesse Raphael show on Take Your Daughter to work day with Gloria Steinem on the panel and they would send a limo to pick us all up.

My only solution to making this early morning call work was to have the girls stay over at my house. I think it may have been Easter vacation. One of the mothers was reluctant. Are you sure you have a wife who will be there? I assured her I had a wife. And so we had pizza for dinner and we gave the girls our spare two bedrooms to figure out the sleeping arrangements while my wife and I huddled through the sounds of pillow fights. And getting 5 girls up at the crack of dawn to get ready for the limo was a slice of parenting.

Well, all went fine and the afternoon limo driver dropped the girls off at the school and us back to Rockaway.

And that was about it for my contact with Jean. 

 

Until yesterday.

Coming next: a 4 hour journey of her wonderful history of adventure through the academic world of Stuyvesant HS through college and grad school at MIT. And how Jean remembers the bridge event. Hint: She vividly remembers the big skylight in my house and how much that visit lodged in her memory, even more than the entire bridge project and how much visiting a teacher's home for the only time meant to her. She remembers having ridden in a limo but had not necessarily connected it to the TV show. Lesson learned: sometimes its worth risking arrest.