A Look at "An Ordinary Public School Teacher"

by Naomi (Spurrier '05) Smith

Minori Nagahara '04 lives in a neighborhood that she likens to "a third world country inside of an industrialized country." Poverty is rampant, and drugs and violence are an everyday part of life for people she sees and interacts with each day.

Nagahara is a sixth grade teacher in inner-city New York City. She works at Public School/Middle School 3 (P.S./M.S. 3), a grade school of about 500 students in Kindergarten through eighth grades in a largely industrial section of the Bronx. Every morning she walks the two miles from her apartment to the school, and after a day filled with language arts, science and energetic kids, she makes the journey home.

"I'm not an adventurer. I'm just an ordinary public school teacher," Nagahara says. "I never thought that I would teach in a place like this," she confesses, "but the Lord eased me into it, and little by little it took shape for me." Nagahara started taking education classes as a freshman at Houghton, thinking that teaching would dovetail nicely with her penchant for working with kids. Under the mentorship of professors of education Mark LaCelle-Peterson and Darlene Bressler, she discovered that she also enjoyed academic research in education and decided to pursue a master's degree. After graduating from Houghton, she enrolled in a language and literacy program at Harvard Graduate School of Education.

As she neared the completion of her degree at Harvard, Nagahara contemplated beginning a doctorate program, but she felt that first she should gain some first-hand experience in the classroom. As a Japanese citizen, her best chance of obtaining a teaching visa was to teach in districts with high demand for teachers—like New York City, an area which often functions as a revolving door for young educators. When she began the job search process, Nagahara was determined to avoid an inner-city job and land a position in a "nice" school in the city (in Manhattan or one of the better parts of Queens or Brooklyn). "I never wanted to teach in the inner city," she admits, "and I fought it all the way."

In the spring of 2005 Nagahara caught a bus from Boston to attend a teaching job fair in New York City. With only a few hours to spend at the fair, she looked at the long lines of people waiting to talk to representatives from the "nice" schools and then at the nearly-empty tables beside the representatives from the Bronx. "I just need to talk to someone," she thought, and bravely approached a few of the inner-city representatives to offer her portfolio and acquire more information. A few weeks later Nagahara went to interview at a school in the Bronx, and now, three years later, she calls her connection with the representatives from P.S./M.S. 3 a "divine appointment."

Nagahara has discovered that teaching requires adaptability and persistence, and she has been grateful for the solid educational preparation she received. "Houghton was a place where I learned to be a learner," she says, "and good teachers are good learners. Every school and community has its own unique needs and characteristics and without the willingness to learn, grow and change it's difficult to serve well. You have to ask yourself, 'What kind of community is this? What do these kids need? How do I get through to the parents?'"

Questions like these are difficult to answer in a community like the Bronx. About half of Nagahara's students are African-American, and most of the rest are Hispanic. The majority come from broken and impoverished families. In a place like that, an educator like Nagahara must be keenly aware of the social gulf between her and her students. "These kids know that I am different, that my life is very different from their lives," she says. When Nagahara's students see her walking the streets of the neighborhood, they wonder what she is doing, and when she explains that she lives nearby, they are often amazed. "I thought teachers came from Connecticut," said one student.

Many of the students at P.S./M.S. 3 remain guarded around their teachers, who can only guess at the depth of the hardship in their lives. "I know that many of my students have absent parents, and that many of them struggle with substance abuse," Nagahara says. "Some days it is a minor miracle that these kids are here—that against all odds, against the fact that they didn't eat anything last night and could have been harmed on the way to school, they come."

Nagahara admits that the baggage the young people carry around is difficult to deal with on top of a teaching load, but she is quick to note that the interesting lives of her students are also part of what energizes and sustains her work. "Yes, I have hard days," she says, "when my students curse me out or when a mentally ill student proves to be more than I can handle. But I don't feel like a martyr. I feel blessed to have a job where, even on the worst day imaginable, I go home knowing that it was all worthwhile."

One of the ways that Nagahara thrives in her work is by relying on a skill she cultivated at Houghton—the ability to be curious. She explains: "My Houghton professors always challenged me to ask and explore complex questions and issues through reading, writing and dialogue. Instead of settling for the easy answers, I learned the thrill of asking good questions and engaging in ongoing conversations. I think this abiding sense of curiosity— curiosity about myself and others and how education can be an important means by which we can become all that God has created us to be—is a large part of what keeps me going in this challenging job."

In conversations with her students, Nagahara has also learned a lesson about grace. "Before coming here, I thought I was a nice person who got along fairly easily with other people, but these kids can drive me to absolutely ungodly thoughts," she says with a laugh. "I've seen the need for the gospel here, the need for good news and for hope. We need people here who know what grace is about, who understand that we are broken people helping other broken people. These kids are more deserving of my compassion than anyone I've ever met. And if I—the privileged one who should be able to love well for all the love I've received— can be forgiven for my shortcomings in loving these kids, there is certainly love and forgiveness enough for them and all of their shortcomings."

After her experiences teaching in the inner city Nagahara hopes to focus her doctoral work on curriculum and instruction, with an emphasis on urban education. Nagahara's "abiding sense of curiosity" will continue to be her strength and her guide. She anticipates taking time for rest and reflection before pursuing further education, but she is already aware of how formative these years in the Bronx have been. "These kids have made an impression on me," Nagahara says, "and this experience will follow me for the rest of my life. But there is more for me to do and more that the Lord wants to do in me."

Naomi (Spurrier '05) Smith works in Houghton's Office of Advancement.