My Mother

When we talk about memorable teachers, we usually refer to what made them memorable to their students. We talk about their teaching prowess, their compassion, enthusiasm, and their empathy for their students. We talk about what teachers gave to the profession without wondering what, if anything, teaching gave back to them. This intermission is about my mother -- how she became a teacher at the age of 42 while maintaining a household and raising two young children. It also describes what teaching gave my mother and how special those gifts have become.

My mother was the daughter of Cuban immigrants who emigrated from Spain to Cuba to escape extreme poverty in the Canary Islands of Spain. Life in Havana, however, was not any easier than it was in Tenerife, and my grandfather moved his family to Staten Island, New York where my mother was born. He opened a hand-rolled cigar store and sold puros bearing the name La Dignidad.

My mother was a very good student but it was the Depression and, in her freshman year of high school, my grandparents told her they could no longer afford the bus fare to high school. She needed to quit and get a job. Her half brother, now married, intervened and she graduated from Curtis High School. The day after graduation she became a bilingual secretary in Manhattan, at Sylvania, the light bulb company. My mother worked as a secretary for eleven years. When she was 28 years old, she married my father who to this day jokes that he saved her from spinsterhood.

My sister and I arrived on the scene over the next four years. My mother was a fifties housewife, offering up kaffee klatches for her neighbors, trading recipes, and sitting on the front lawn in the chaise longue during long summer afternoons. My father had other ideas. He had suffered a heart attack just after my parents married and had worried ever since that, should something happen to him, we would financially strapped. One Sunday afternoon, when I was six, my father told my mother at the dinner table that he thought he should send her to college. My mother sat there smoking her Salems (she hadn't renounced them yet), my father puffed on his pipe and my sister and I kept eating, thinking my father was joking.

He wasn't. He told my mother he wanted her to have "something to fall back on" if he died. Well, that was that. What I never could have envisioned that day was just how profoundly this decision would affect our family, and particularly my mother.

At the time, my mother was 36 years old. She must have researched college entrance requirements and discovered that she could not apply to college until she had taken the SATs. And she could not sit for the SATs until she had taken an algebra course, which had not been offered when she was in high school. Thus began our saga of watching our mother become a student.

Twice a week after dinner, she drove to Montclair High School to take an algebra course. That done, she began prepping for the SATs. My mother bought a stack of index cards and studied her words with rapt attention. She contacted the head of the education department at Montclair State Teacher's College - now Montclair University - and asked him if she was out of her mind for doing this at her age. He said no, go ahead and take the SATs. She did and scored in the 95th percentile. She applied to Montclair State, was accepted, and enrolled at the age of 38.

Back in 1962, when my mother was a freshman it was not yet trendy, much less customary, for older students, and particularly women, to go back to school. The only older students who enrolled back then were men on the G.I bill and divorced women. Accordingly, Montclair State made no accommodations for a mother of two. Her first week of class she wore a freshman beanie. She took physical education and jumped up and down on a trampoline. She dug earthworms for biology class on Saturday morning. She abandoned her role as the neighbor with the cookies and observed our next door neighbor's children playing -- one of her education requirements. When my mother had an art class, we trooped into Manhattan and looked at weird paintings by a guy name Picasso.

Through all this my father was more than stoic; he was cooperative and supportive. Secretly, I think he liked sharing my mother's college exploits, since he had planned to go into teaching himself, but never did, for financial reasons. When my mother made the dean's list first semester, my father acted as though he had done it himself. And my mother's new mentor, the head of the education department, saw her grades and sent her a congratulatory "I knew you could do it" letter. When my mother had finals, my father took us to the Brooklyn Aquarium, or to the rock quarry to look for minerals. To help out, my grandmother came to live with us part of the year; being Spanish, she thought that we were all pathologically undernourished.

When I was 12 and my sister was 11, my mother graduated from Montclair State. We have a picture of us all outside the house, posing for the graduation picture my mother never got twenty years earlier. She graduated cum laude. She received the third and final letter from her mentor at Montclair State, telling her how proud he was of her accomplishments, especially with a young family to care for.

That fall, my mother began a twenty-year career as a Spanish teacher at Cedar Grove High School, five miles from our house in northern New Jersey. I don't know how good a teacher my mother was, but I do know that she worked very hard at what she did. It also made a big difference to have two incomes in our family. My father breathed a lot easier. We bought a second used car, we went to Spain when I was 13 (tax write off for my mother the teacher); we saved for our college. My mother even enrolled in a 401k plan, a novelty back then. Funny how far $15,000 went back then.

More importantly, however, my mother got a new lease on life. She had a job, a career, and a life beyond our front yard. Never much of a housekeeper, the dusting and cleaning became my father's domain; he had written, "dust me!" on the mirror one morning but my mother ignored it, and I guess he had had enough. He became the weekend housekeeper. In addition to having a career, my mother now also had a social life. She went to every senior prom at the high school, ostensibly to bid farewell to her students. Secretly, I think my mother was making up for lost opportunities. She bought a prom dress; my father rented a tuxedo. I have a picture of them in front of the high school prom arbor, smiling for the camera along with the graduating seniors. My mother also found a set of friends in her fellow teachers. She became best friends with her department head, Mrs. Esposito, with the French teacher, Mrs. Shakin; with the Latin teacher. When my grandmother died, the principal and vice principal traveled to Staten Island for the funeral. At the time, I did not think that exceptional; it was just the nature of relationships at my mother's otherwise unexceptional high school.

In 1984, my parents moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina as a function of my father's job. After twenty years of teaching, my mother gave it up. She was ready. Times had changed: students did not take foreign languages anymore; the German and French departments at Cedar Grove High had been cut and curtailed, respectively. More importantly, the atmosphere in public schools was changing and my mother was weary of dealing with parents who constantly pressed for better grades, and students who skipped class with no apparent repercussions.

Even after she and my father moved to North Carolina, my mother stayed in touch with her "teacher friends," as we called them. They do more than send Christmas cards; they actually still see each other. Her teacher friends all came to my wedding; on her twice-annual trips to New York my mother (and my father) join her fellow teachers for dinner at a Portuguese restaurant in Newark NJ.

And my mother is still a teacher. She teaches an extremely popular "shared learning" course in Spanish. She has 38 students, mostly of them at least 40 years old. She makes muffins for class. She gives pop quizzes and tells jokes in Spanish to teach verb tenses. My father goes with her, to set up the slide projector, pass out the snacks and provide spousal support. My father says my mother is a different person in front of the classroom. Her students love her. One of them gave her a state of the art computer and twenty hours of free lessons. At the age of 78, my mother's teaching career still serves her well.

-- Jean-Marie Simon, American University