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TI: Well tell me more about her and why you thought she was a good teacher.

HM: Well, she was very dedicated. She was a very talented teacher, very intelligent. And she knew the situation quite well within the camp and she had sized up what was going on. And she knew we were very low in our morale in terms of the school spirit, and our willingness to set aside all these problems and try to become good students. So she made some very interesting challenges for us. And she kept on saying, "This is a temporary-type situation. In a couple of years we're going to be out of this camp and you're gonna have to go back to your regular educational routine so you have to keep up with your work." And she was very emphatic about the thing. And she encouraged us to do all the things that would enable us to become good students and become college material if we went through the process. So she was driven by other than just normal teaching objectives. She was driven to help us try to get to the next level of our education process.

And one of the things that she had as a project, was to try to create kind of a... open future environment. So that we could look at our situation in camp as a temporary function, and say what would we like to do as a future career function and profession. And her mindset was kind of different from my parents or anybody else that I knew. And she said that, "You have to make this opportunity for yourself and create an opportunity," and, "This is just something that's going to be a couple of years and if you get past this, you're going to be able to make it to the next level." And so she had in this project, "What university would you like to attend?" Kind of an interesting project. And she had gathered a huge assembly of college catalogs, and she had available on her desk all these things and she had a supplementary bookcase and she had all these catalogs in there and you could look through all these things. And things that she had were things like University of Miami -- and I'd never heard of University of Miami. She had Harvard, she had all these different schools. And she says, "Well these are the things that they're offering and you guys should make yourself available to these things because some of you might make it to these different levels." And she was a different type of instructor.

TI: Well what was the reaction of, of the administration and other teachers towards her doing this?

HM: Well they thought that was great. Because here's a person that's going out of her way to try to help the kids.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.