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LG: You moved out to the East Coast, but the rest of your family stayed?

TM: Yeah, I was the only one on the East Coast

LG: Was that...

TM: Well, the wonderful thing about teaching is you get the summer off. So because my mother was, you know, lived until she was ninety-eight, I could always have a summer in Seattle, which was much nicer than the East Coast, because the weather was so much better. So I would spend at least two months out there. So, in a sense, I would say, even though my sisters lived there, I probably -- and with my mother -- much more than they are because I was constantly with her for, you know, that continuous period of time, whereas they might just visit each month, maybe a couple of times and for a short period of time. So, being a teacher, it allowed me to do that.

LG: So you moved to Philadelphia and started teaching in Germantown?

TM: At Germantown Friends School, I taught third and fourth grade. And at that time, it was a new class, in that they put two grades together. And so you taught them for two years. So, the third graders advanced to the fourth grade, and the fourth graders moved on. And at that time, I could develop... what was wonderful is I could develop curriculum. So the fourth grade curriculum was kind of sacrosanct, and it was ancient Greece. And the other alternate year was a little bit open. So I decided I would try to teach Japan Studies. And so I did that for at least, I would say, twenty-five years. And yet, probably of that twenty-five years, maybe ten of them, we decided, okay, we need to teach social studies that reflects the students in our class. So we hadn't taught anything about Africa or any African countries. So with Japan, half the year was Japan, and the other half was, I did Kenya, another teacher did Ghana, another did Nigeria, and a third did Egypt. So we did an African Studies using those four different countries. So it was pretty advanced in that time, but we taught it in a project way. So, you know, we taught reading through folktales. So when we did Japan, we read folktales from Japan, and history and with Africa, the same thing, folktales from Africa. And the culminating experience for Japan was what we know here is Oshogatsu. So we had a New Year's Day celebration, where I had worked with the parents and we made sushi, and other parents would make it, like teriyaki chicken and so forth at home. And then we'd have it and then a friend taught some Japanese dances, and the music department helped with songs. So we did that, and we invited the parents to come and it was fun. And then with Africa, what we did was we had each of the classes create crafts. And then we had a big marketplace, and they had to barter for all their goods. And the parents became the merchants, and so they had fun trying to bargain with the kids and the currency was cowrie shells, and so it was a lot of fun. We had, we also had drumming, we had African games, and we had songs. So it was an amazing event.

LG: What year did you come to Philadelphia?

TM: I came in 1976.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.