Welcome Back: Rediscovering an old Friend

Dear SSIS Faculty –

School life is a never-ending stream of beginnings and endings. Today marks the end of the two-week new faculty orientation period. This year was special in that we welcomed an historically small number of new faculty, even with the addition of several new positions for the coming year. It’s been a wonderful period of getting to know the new faculty and I’m looking forward to introducing them to you at our opening meeting in the SSIS auditorium this coming Tuesday.

If there has been one constant in the Sylte family over the past several years, it has been our trips in the summer. Hsiaoling and I have loved exploring new cities around the world with our four children and we have always been grateful for the international teaching life which has afforded us these opportunities. This year marked the first time we weren’t all together for the summer.

The girls returned yet again to the Saigon South English Camp with a host of SSIS and LSTS students to offer a summer camp for Vietnamese middle school students at the Hiep Phuoc Middle School. Lea, however, had to leave camp early for a six-week internship at the Sheraton Hotel in Nha Trang from which she has yet to return, and after camp the rest of us headed to Taiwan to visit family. While we missed time together as a family, I was so happy that she could finally experience the work place. Like many of you, I grew working summer and weekends from the age of fourteen, and those experiences were just as powerful in preparing me for the “real world” as my primary and secondary schooling and college.

Last year was our first in thirteen years with no child in the elementary school and this year Karstan joins the high school. He downloaded his reading list for ninth grade and, much to my surprise, reintroduced me to an old friend: Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.

I was born in the Midwest, and I spent my earliest childhood in the northeast before arriving in Nashville, Tennessee at the age of six to begin elementary school in Mrs. K.’s first grade class at Eakin Elementary. This was still the mid-1960s and Mrs. K.’s mission, along with teaching us reading, writing, and arithmetic, was to produce Southern ladies and gentlemen. From her I learned the fundamentals, such as answering every adult question with “Yes, ma’am” and “No, sir,” a habit which is still ingrained in me to this day with anyone senior to me in age or position.

I also learned things such as “no man remains seated while a woman is standing,” how to draw a Thanksgiving turkey by first outlining my hand with crayon, and how to place my right hand over my heart whilst reciting the Pledge of Alliance with my six-year-old-self standing at ramrod attention.

In third grade I was placed in a specially created section for our first African-American teacher, Ms. O., who had come from Columbia Teacher’s College in New York with lots of new ideas and taught us that the pilgrims waged genocide on the Native American population and that spelling was just a tool of the oppressor class and that if our writing was phonetically decipherable, that was all that mattered.

I was reminded of this when I spied To Kill a Mockingbird on Karstan’s reading list and encouraged him to choose it. Sure, it was longer than some of the other books, but the book had such a powerful impression on me growing up.

After my time with Ms. O., Nashville moved into a period of forced integration of the school system through bussing and I ended up across town at Head Elementary as Nashville confronted the inherent inequalities of “separate but equal,” more successfully, I might add, than many northern cities.

When I read Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, it was as a transplanted Northerner who had spent significant time in the South. Life in the rural south in the 1960s (when Lee published the novel) was not so very different from that in Maycomb, Alabama in the mid-1930s when the novel is set. The themes of racial injustice and prejudice, courage and grace, all had a powerful impact on my young teenage self. I decided to re-read the novel this summer along with my son so that we could talk about the context—something largely inaccessible to someone who has grown up outside the United States.

In doing so I discovered something I had never noticed before. Harper Lee, it seems, despised the modern educational ideas of Thomas Dewey. Scout, the young protagonist of the story, is a bright and precocious young girl who can’t wait to start first grade. Her first-grade teacher, Miss Caroline Fischer, was from Northern Alabama which was “full of Liquor Interests, Big Mules, steel companies, Republicans, professors, and other persons of no background” and a fervent devotee of Dewey. Miss Caroline is furious that Scout’s father has been teaching her to read and demands that he stop so that she “can undo the damage” he has caused.

Jem, Scout’s older brother, comforts her: “Don’t worry, Scout . . . . Our teacher says Ms. Caroline’s introducing a new way of teaching. She learned about it in college. It’ll be in all the grades soon. . . . It’s the Dewey Decimal System.”

Despite Jem’s childish inexactitude, it’s clear as the novel continues that Harper Lee wanted little or no truck with whole language instruction and an infantilized curriculum. Consider the opening of Chapter 4:

“The remainder of my schooldays were no more auspicious than the first. Indeed, they were an endless Project that slowly evolved into a Unit, in which miles of construction paper and wax crayon were expended by the State of Alabama in its well-meaning but fruitless efforts to teach me Group Dynamics. What Jem called the Dewey Decimal System was school-wide by the end of my first year, so I had no chance to compare it with other teaching techniques. I could only look around me: Atticus and my uncle, who went to school at home, knew everything—at least, what one didn’t know the other did. Furthermore, I couldn’t help noticing that my father had served for years in the state legislature, elected each time without opposition, innocent of the adjustments my teachers thought essential to the development of Good Citizenship.” [Excerpt From: Harper Lee. “To Kill a Mockingbird.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/dmr-Z.l]

And this got me to thinking about one of the many reasons I love SSIS.

At SSIS we believe very much in the constant investigation of the “new” in education—things such as new and evolving definitions of literacy, new methods for assessing learning, and the importance of brain research. We are constantly open to change when it brings demonstrable improvements to teaching and learning.

Yet we also believe in tradition: traditional “foundational knowledge” that all educated people ought to master, the importance of teacher’s understanding local context (as Miss Caroline clearly did not) in our host country and the home cultures and languages of our students, and the importance of balancing personal desires with obligations to family and community. We believe absolutely in an equal partnership with our parents in demonstrating the importance of our Core Values (Academic Excellence, a Sense of Self, Dedicated Service, Balance in Life, and Respect for All) even while we believe we have a heightened role to play in inculcating a spirit of Academic Excellence in our students. If languages are windows to culture and history, then we are humbled that most of our students have greater access to that knowledge than many of us.

I’m very proud of what we offer our students here at SSIS.

And while Atticus Finch is the epitome of a self-directed life-long learner, and the preparedness of many US students today for adult life is in question, I can’t help but think that Harper Lee might have found something redeeming in the modern education of the classrooms of Saigon South International School.

I am grateful to you all for your dedication to the education of our students and look forward to another wonderful year together.

Sincerely yours,

Mark Sylte, Head of School