MY STORY
I have lived my life in several different parts of the country. Having grown up in San Jose, California, I moved to Philadelphia for graduate school, then settled into New England for the next 40-plus years. About ten years ago, my husband and I hired movers and brought our lives to New Orleans, Louisiana.
I grew up in a working-class neighborhood, which surrounded me with friends from varied ethnic backgrounds. My elementary school also shared students with a school for "crippled children" (this was the era of polio), meaning I sometimes had classmates with leg braces and serious speech and vision challenges. My friend James taught me to play chess, grasping his chess pieces with curled fingers that he could barely control.
Throughout school, I was devoted to library books. For many years, my older sister and I walked to the library every Saturday morning for Story Hour and to exchange one stack of books for another. My library card - blue cardboard imprinted with my name - was treasured and well-worn. My parents encouraged me to read and to learn, even though neither of them graduated from high school. In fact, my father's reading skills never allowed him to read a book on his own.
Mrs. Goddard, my ninth grade English teacher, was the primary influence in my growing up years. A stately African American woman who often wore colorful dashikis to school, she introduced us to Greek and Roman mythology, Shakespeare and J.D. Salinger. She taught us to write and she encouraged us to think, which meant she also encouraged us to open our hearts and minds to everything literary.
Not surprisingly, I chose to major in literature when I entered Stanford University. I became an English teacher, teaching first in Philadelphia, then Brooklyn, then various schools around Massachusetts. As my teaching interests became more focused, I became a special education teacher, which deepened my understanding of how children learn and how good teachers teach.
Rigorous co-teaching with classroom teachers also helped them to embrace my enthusiasm for the inclusion of children with Down syndrome or autism or behavior challenges. I completed my career with fourteen years as a middle school principal. Along the way, I learned much from atypical children struggling to enter the mainstream of school life - children with disabilities or complex gender identities, children whose families struggled with poverty or homelessness or racial discrimination.
As part of my career choices over the years, I completed a master’s degree in Urban Education at the University of Pennsylvania and a doctorate in special education leadership at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. I also learned much in my several years as a Guardian ad Litem in the State of Vermont.