Aspirations for Learning & Teaching

In high school, I was not a ‘college-bound’ student. I graduated from a large inner-city school in Seattle with the immediate goal of moving away and supporting myself. It would be eight years before I went to college. While living in Boston, I decided to take college classes at Northeastern after starting a self-improvement initiative which included giving up fashion magazines and attending a series of free, public lectures at the Harvard School of Public Health.

I found that I enjoyed any subject or discipline taught conscientiously, with a focus on asking and answering questions. I planned on majoring in history or English, thinking that I might teach. These were my strengths in high school and they did not require the attainment of what seemed like a foreign language used by science-based disciplines. However, in history classes, I found that there was a real representation and point-of-view bias in the primary records used. The written histories alone did not reflect the histories of those that I grew up with. I ended up looking for other methods of gaining knowledge about how people lived in the past. I discovered the sciences through my desire to understand the world around me, and its past. Environmental and biological archaeology and the geographies introduced me to data collection and analysis, research informed by both experiments as well as literature, and a lot of really interesting questions that drew me towards the sciences. When fueled by curiosity and engagement, the vocabulary of science became less daunting.

The teachers who influenced me the most growing up were the ones who refused to give up on me. During my sophomore year of high school Mr. Jody summarily dismissed my, ‘I am just bad at math’ mutterings and signed me up for math tutoring for 30 minutes after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays without my consent. It seemed rude not to show up, and I didn't think he was going to let it go.

Mr. Jody was the tutor.

At the end of the year, after finals, he called me to his desk and told me that I had received the second highest score on the math exam in the class. I pointed out that there were only 18 students in the class. He replied, ‘no, I mean the sophomore class.’

I cannot tell you what I did with my summer that year, but that moment in Mr. Jody’s classroom is still crystal clear to me and has remained with me for twenty years. Mr. Jody gave me much more than the support that I needed to earn a relatively high score on a math exam. He gave me the courage to try learning, even when failure seemed certain.