Meeting up with a Former Student (part 2) - What we talked about for 4 hours

The most fun thing about seeing students as adults when the last time you saw them they were kids is hearing their life stories. Once in a while they become friends.

 

The response to my post about meeting up with Jean who was in my computer classes and part of a gender stem initiative has gotten an amazing response on Facebook from former students, former colleagues, family and friends.While I had often thought about what happened to Jean over the years because she clearly had enormous potential, I hadn't had the kind of relationship with her I had with my regular classroom students and barely knew her.

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 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.

October 12, 2024

 

I only told half the story. I've met with former students over the years and look forward to these meetings. Despite telling them to call me Norm, they still call me Mr. Scott -- to them it's still teacher/student. Those students had been in my class for the entire year, so a different relationship totally than the one I had with Jean, which was based on a short-time frame project we did that included an overnight visit and stay over at my house.

 

When Jean first contacted me two weeks ago the email was as good as any teacher could expect. And follow-up texts showed a level of enthusiasm for our meeting that pumped me up. But would the actual meeting come down to? Chatting and then saying goodbye, possibly forever? 

 

Well, from the first seconds I opened the door to my apartment, Jean's enthusiasm infected me. In my previous post I described how Jean was on a team of girls who built a bridge and were feted at a number of events set up by the Erector Set PR firm. But she remembered precious little of all that, to my surprise. She did remember vividly the visit to my house and that there was a limo ride. So I filled her in on the entire story as chronicled in my previous post. 

 

The plaque given to us at the AMNH somehow survived Sandy hurricane and is still hanging in my basement. Jean is quoted in the article. She didn't remember.

 

 

Jean had indicated that now that she had one child in the school and a 3 year old to follow, and as a new member of the PTA and the SLT, she wanted to know a lot more about how the system functions and what to expect.

She came to the right person. So we did a lot on the school level issues and I explained the district (CEC) and city (PEP) issues but also went back to some history of the local school boards. I knew something about the recent politics at the school and gave her the context and some of the pressures put on the principal.

 

I'm sure it was overload. But then she asked about issues related to reading and math problems and general curricula and she stimulated my aging brain to touch base with my ideas on how kids learn - and how excited I had always been about trying new things. I told her about my attempt to teach chess and do robotics and ideas I have about how you can do an entire curricula by doing theater. I explained that in 5 minutes of a kid reading aloud I could tell if he needed phonics. I'd bet her kid didn't need phonics to any extent, yet the phonics police are out there forcing every kid to go through it. I had to really recall the often frustrating experience in teaching reading to a full class. My MA in reading instruction was geared to one on one where you diagnose the problem with reading through a battery of tests and then design a corrective, all of this impossible in a full classroom. The best advice for improving reading is to read a lot but  reading can be a chore if you have to struggle. I have a thesis: Unlock the block and once you do there is no longer a need to teach reading to that child. Anyway -- as usual I got wrapped up and talked too long - who me? No, actually I did a lot of listening.

I mentioned I taught the "one" (top) class only once or twice and she had no idea what I was talking about. So we went into homo and hetero and tracking based on test scores. She understood how difficult it must be for teachers to teach a wide range of skill levels and we explored the the pros and cons.

Having spent most of the past 25 years focused on ed politics, going back to my progressive education roots was so exciting. And since Jean is interested in trying to get some things going at the school, I can see myself getting involved. The problem may be that the school is in transition to a new principal and we know how that game may work out. When I taught there the principal had zero interest in exciting programs. It was all about testing. So what else is new? Jean was surprised to find her child had been tested in kindergarten. I sadly informed her the "play with blocks" days are dead. 

So that led to the profit and politics of testing and the anti-public, pro charter, attack on public education and how Bloomberg turned the system into one where schools compete. She wanted to know if principals worked together to support each other. I rolled by eyes but promised to introduce her to Julie C who was one principal who is exceptional. I also plugged her into Leonie Haimson's listserve so she can see the educational issues on the table.

As we talked my energy level kept rising. We talked computer programming and neural networks and AI. And I'm sure even more about things I've already forgotten.
 

Jean went through her extensive career path in computer science, finance and her getting hit professionally with the 2000 dot.com crash and then at her next phase the 2008 Lehman Bros crash. And the journey to Silicon Valley and back and the two year see the world tour with her future husband who she met at Stuyvesant, and their marriage in Dubrovnik (one of my favorite places), Croatia.

Well, it was getting on toward 3:30 and I wanted to show Jean a bit of Murray Hill, a neighborhood I've grown to love, walked her to Grand Central to say goodbye, I hope not for the last time as there is so much more to talk about and if you know me, I sort of like to talk.

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One side story. Jean went to IS 318, the flagship middle school in district 14. She had a vague memory of how she got there. I explained it to her. 

Schools were competitive even before Bloomberg. In late June, 1993 I received a call from the principal of 318. He and I had always been on opposite sides politically, so I was surprised. He wanted to know why Jean was going to a middle school in neighboring Dist 32 and not his school. "We need to keep our top students in the district." I felt I was in the middle of a recruitment war. It was clear that highly rated school like 318 fought for every top level student. The school she had chosen in Dist 32 had a great rep, so I told him I didn't think there was much I can do. He asked me to talk to her and her parents and just ask them to stop by his school. And sure enough, when I had to gather the girls to work on the project the next fall, Jean was going to 318. Of course she went on to Stuyvesant and she mentioned that there were about 20-25% Asian students then.

On Thursday, she had no memory other than she and her parents had visited the other school and somehow she ended up at 318. I connected the dots.

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.