Acting on Principle
Teaching Those Who Need It Most
Dissatisfied with being just an observer of life, a young journalist becomes a teacher on the Navajo Reservation.
By Michele Morris
The beefy 15-year-old purses his lips and slowly sounds out the words in a sentence in Curious George and then chortles with laughter. When he’s finished reading the book on his own for the first time, his teacher, Jessica Shyu, jumps up and down with glee. “You did it, you did it,” she cries, patting him on the back. The expression on the boy’s face is pure joy. The boy can ride a horse, shear a sheep, and make a fire, but he can barely read. While many students in his school lag several years behind, his reading skills are an appalling 10 years behind. Shyu, a young teacher with Teach for America in New Mexico, has made it her mission to help students in her special education classes shrink that gap.
The Navajo National Indian Reservation in northern New Mexico is a world of startlingly beautiful landscapes and staggering education problems. Here in this remote corner of the Southwest, per capita income is a paltry $7,269. Native American children grow up in a world of poverty rather than plenty. Many don’t own a winter coat, some of them live in homes without electricity, few own books. The need for excellent teachers is especially critical in a school district where students score significantly below grade level in core curriculum areas such as reading, writing, and mathematics. Students entering local schools are two and a half to three years behind the state average when they enter first grade. While most progress, some fall even further behind, which is why demand for special education teachers is particularly high. The severity of the problems—and the geographic isolation—contribute to a particularly low retention rate for teachers.
Jessica Shyu, a young teacher at the Ch’Ooshgai Community School in Tohatchi, New Mexico, a Navajo village about 30 miles north of Gallup, is an outsider at a school where most of the staff grew up on the reservation. She is 23; they are over 40 and married with children—and grandchildren. She is Chinese-American; they are Navajo-American. For the past two years Jessica has written a blog about her life on the reservation, her challenges and frustrations as a teacher, and her hopes, dreams, and goals for her students (see sidebar). Full of tears and triumphs, honesty and humility, it’s the story of an evolving activist—a journalist who decided to spend two years teaching underprivileged children, and now has decided to make teaching her life’s work.
Just two years ago Jessica Shyu, the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, was finishing her degree at the University of Maryland where she majored in journalism. An energetic and aspiring journalist, Jessica worked part-time at various news jobs including USAToday.com. “Covering a fire or a shooting had become almost routine,” she recalls. “I found myself wanting to get beyond the news. I was interviewing people who were doing something to change the world, and I felt left out. It began to dawn on me that I was an observer of life, and I wanted to be a participant.”
One day while sitting in journalism class, she recalled a beloved middle school teacher who had taught on a reservation. “She said the experience inspired her,” Shyu recalls. Something clicked a few days later when Jessica learned that a recruiter for Teach for America would be visiting the campus.
Teach for America (TFA) was born in 1989 when Wendy Kopp, a senior at Princeton, dreamed up a Peace Corps style program that would recruit college graduates to spend two years teaching in low-income, low-performing schools. Its stated mission is to “eliminate educational inequity by enlisting our nation’s most promising future leaders in the effort.” Every year several thousand “corps members” fan out across America taking teaching jobs in struggling schools in diverse locations such as the Mississippi Delta, Harlem, and the Navajo Reservation.
On a lark, Jessica filled out the application and promptly forgot about it. “I never dreamed I’d be accepted,” she says. “I wasn’t an education major, and my only teaching experience was tutoring Vietnamese refugee children.” But Jessica always had been a helper and a doer. “My mother was a nurse in a nursing home,” she explains. “From the time I was in kindergarten, I went to the nursing home after school and helped the patients, pushing wheelchairs, running errands.”
“Right from the start Jessica stood out,” says Rachel Meiklejohn, program director for TFA in New Mexico. “Some teachers give us a list of their preferences, but Jessica had no wish list. She said she trusted us to place her where she could make a difference.”
When Shyu took up her new post as a middle school teacher in Tohatchi, a village in the northwestern corner of New Mexico, she had never been out West. A self-described city girl whose idea of an outing was going to a museum or restaurant, Shyu found herself living in a teacherage, a dormitory for teachers near the school, in a town with two gas stations, a post office, and a couple of churches. If she wanted an outing, she walked west toward the mesas or drove 30 miles south to Gallup, a town of 20,000, where she bought groceries or went to a movie.
Not surprisingly, her entry was a shock. “I felt very isolated,” she recalls. She shed more tears the first few months she was in New Mexico than she’d ever cried. She commiserated with other new TFA teachers in the area who were fighting the same battles. But slowly, she acquired confidence in the classroom and learned to be comfortable spending time alone. “I got to know myself,” she says. “I learned that routines are good. I learned to appreciate the earth and nature in a different way.”
As she worked hard at inspiring her students, she found herself being inspired by them. By the student who came by to sell bags of piÒon nuts at night so his parents would have money for gas in the morning. By the 4-year-old neighbor with the pink purse who stopped by to visit. By the determination in a 13-year-old who discovered that he was good at math. By the little girl who taught her how to Indian dance.
Slowly she learned that she could make a difference. “I always planned to go back to journalism with wisdom,” she says. “I felt the natural desire to be humble, and I learned humility for myself. There were days when the kids were rolling around on the floor, and no one was listening. I was ready to cry, but I’d stand here and start to laugh. Six months earlier I was sitting in the glass offices at USA Today. Here I was herding kids who were baaing like sheep. I learned to have a sense of humor.”
As a first-generation American, Shyu had high expectations for herself, as did her parents. “My parents wanted me to be a doctor or lawyer,” she says. “They had just gotten used to me being a journalist when I decided to become a teacher.” Their attitude reflects society’s. “Teachers are not given the respect they deserve,” she insists. “We dismiss them because they pull a lousy paycheck. I’ve interviewed people from all walks of life. I have friends who are lawyers and investment bankers. It’s so difficult to be a good teacher. That’s why I want to do it.”
Before she left, Shyu had thought she could bring more to a multi-cultural urban school, which is why she listed San Francisco and New Orleans as her first choices. But as the only Chinese-American on the reservation, she found ways to connect with her Navajo students. “I shared my experiences with them,” she said. “We’d talk about what it was like to be Navajo-American or Asian-American.”
Along the way Shyu found herself developing more empathy than she thought possible. “My students’ frustrations are my frustrations,” she says. “They don’t know how to wipe their noses or how to read or no one will sit next to them at lunch. I asked myself how I could help my students. I wanted to help them help themselves.” One of her goals was to teach her students life skills. At the end of the first year, she took her students to lunch at Denny’s and saw their hard work pay off. They learned to put their napkins in their laps and ask questions in public. One boy who was illiterate at the beginning of the year could find the type of hamburger he wanted on the menu. All of them could add up their bill and calculate the tip. “Watching my students muster everything they learned through the school year and apply it at Denny’s was among the proudest moments for me this year,” Shyu says. “I should have done this earlier. I should have done this more.”
Another time she planned a field trip to the beach. None of her students had ever been to the ocean or seen a beach. She asked each one to choose a beach read, she brought towels and snacks, and they walked to a nearby mesa where the sand was white as snow. They put down their towels, picked up their books, and read under the big blue sky. She hoped to show them that reading could be a pleasurable experience and to let them use their imagination to picture a world beyond the reservation.
As Shyu started her second year on the reservation, she found that tears had given way to smiles of recognition. She realized she would never blend in, but she’d found her niche. The landscape began to feel familiar, and her job wasn’t as overwhelming. Former students stopped by to say hello or to quiz her in the hallway about multiplication. Parents came to school to thank her for helping their son or daughter. “Teaching is still the hardest thing I’ve ever tried,” she admits, “but at least I’m more confident as an educator and as an outsider in this rural community.”+
Michele Morris, author of The Cowboy Life, is based in Park City, Utah.
Oh, What I’m Learning: From the Blog of Jessica Shyu
As a special education teacher on the Navajo Reservation, Jessica Shyu has had a steep learning curve. She chronicles it all at http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/jshyu/
September 7, 2005 No amount of philosophizing and intellectualizing will erase the fact that this is rough. Each day I’m a little more behind. Who am I kidding? I’m a lot more behind. I have not recorded grades in two weeks. I am tired. I need to vacuum my house.
October 18, 2005 I have found the secret to success. The secret is in the multiplication tables. Virtually all my 13-, 14-, and 15-year-old students came in not knowing how to multiply. Now most have already memorized the 2’s and 5’s. Some are already on division. I’m still a fresh and inexperienced (read: lousy) teacher, but these kids will leave this school year knowing their tables at the snap of a finger.
December 6, 2005 I gently chastise my students each morning for walking around in freezing temperatures with little more than a long-sleeved T-shirt. They say they’re not cold, they don’t need jackets, laughing at my over-concern as they huddle over the heater. I peck at them, half-jokingly, but know they probably can’t afford them. Almost everyone here is poor. And sometimes that makes poverty seem almost OK. But my kids remind me it’s not.
March/April 2007
Yoga+ magazine