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LG: So you had this period of getting readjusted to American culture and university life. What did you do after you graduated?

TM: So I went in the Peace Corps, but after the Peace Corps, you mean? What did I do?

LG: Yeah, did you still have some college to finish?

TM: No, no, I did four years. '63 to '67 was college. So '67 to '69 was Peace Corps.

LG: So what did you do after...

TM: So when I came back, I hadn't applied to graduate school, I was too late, and so one of my friends said, "Oh, there's a job here in Indiana, why don't you come?" And I had no other job offers, so I said, "Okay." So I went, and I stayed with her family, and I lived in a town called Nightstown outside of Indianapolis, and that was a totally different experience, because it was somewhat rural. And again, the Vietnamese war was still happening, and I don't think the people in that town had seen very many live Asian people. So I would go into a store or a restaurant, and everyone would turn around and stare. I'd walk down the street, people would turn around and stare. So I said, "Well, a year of this, I'm out of here." So I went to grad school in Washington, D.C. and got a masters, and it was a work study program, so I taught in DC schools, community schools right near the Hilton Hotels, and I did that for two years, and it was really rough, it was very difficult, because I had just been teaching in places where the children -- because by then I wasn't in secondary, had been teaching elementary -- the children who were like in fifth grade were very savvy, and psychologically, I think they were smarter than I was because they had to manipulate their environment. And I remembered that at the top of the hill was a 7-Eleven, and on that door of the 7-Eleven -- this was in '69 -- it said, "Only one person at a time, it'd be locked for kids." So only one kid could come in at a time, because the neighborhood was predominately Black. And so I realized that's what they face every morning, the suspicion and feeling rejected. And so in school, it was difficult. They knew how to manage adults, so it was tough teaching there. I taught with another grad student, and we were asked to teach this class mainly because the regular teacher, after two weeks, quit, because class was so unmanageable. And they say, "Will you take this over? Because you've got teaching experience." And so I said, "Yes, if my classmate will teach with me." So we taught together and we did some pretty unusual things. We taught through projects, we tried to get the kids really involved in their learning. We were taught a course on boxing, and set up the room with a boxing square and got the local police station to come in and do a pal thing with the kids and teach them that. It was interesting, it was really an interesting teaching experience, but it was rough. It was very, very hard. And then I taught children with learning differences for four years in D.C., and then I got a job offer here in Philadelphia at a Friends school. And so I taught there for thirty-six years.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.