It is ten-fifteen on a September morning at Public School 25
in Bedford-Stuyvesant, N.Y., and Kate Maull, ’05, is
teaching four Hispanic children how to write better English.
Also known as the “Eubie Blake Elementary School,” PS
25 serves more than 700 kids from one of America’s most
economically challenged neighborhoods—a low-income and
periodically crime-wracked section of Brooklyn that owns a longstanding
reputation as one of the most blighted urban landscapes in the
country. Pockmarked with abandoned buildings and junked cars,
the 3.5-square-mile mostly Black neighborhood became a national
symbol of urban decay starting way back in the 1960s. And although
living conditions in “Bed-Stuy” have improved significantly
in recent years, more than 72 percent of its children are born
into poverty each year.
 Kate
Maull, ’05, a former communications major at UCSD,
believes deeply in the mission of the rapidly growing Teach For
America (TFA) educational outreach program. Modeled on the U.S.
Peace Corps, TFA now reaches more than 375,000 economically challenged
public school kids each day. Maull, a soft-spoken San Francisco
Bay area native, joined as one of its ESL (English as a Second
Language) instructors shortly before her graduation. She sees
her goal as a second-year teacher in the program to help provide “equal
access to quality education for all of our school children, regardless
of where they live or their economic status.”
She always begins her day with a smile and some positive reinforcement.
“Okay, let’s begin with our thumbs up and thumbs down!” she
says, as her 45-minute ESL class with four 9-year-olds gets underway. “Jacky,
do you have a ‘thumbs up’ you can share with us?”
Seated across the table from her teacher, fourth grader Jacky,
whose parents came to this country a few years ago from Mexico
and El Salvador, lights up with excitement. “My ‘thumbs
up’ is that I read a lot of books over the summer,” she
blurts out. “And I learned a lot.”
“That sounds like fun,” says Maull.
One by one, the other three kids at the table present the class
with their “thumbs up and thumbs down” experiences—as
part of a game invented by “Miss Maull” that allows
them to begin each class with a conversational icebreaker.
“My cousin keeps hitting me,” says Edwin, whose family came
to Bed-Stuy from the Dominican Republic only recently.
“Hitting
me hard!”
“So what do you do about it?”
“Tell my mom.”
“That’s probably a good idea, isn’t it?”
Edwin nods, seemingly satisfied.
“Alicia, sit up, please,” Maull says, firmly but
warmly.
“Hands to yourself, please.
”
“For my ‘thumbs up,’ I passed on to third grade,” says
Ruben, also a Spanish-speaker from the Dominican Republic.
“That’s good, Ruben, that’s very good.”
And so it went, for the next 40 minutes or so, as Kate Maull
led her youthful charges through a writing-reading exercise
in which they drew their own faces, named the languages
they speak
at home and then wrote out a few words to describe themselves.
From start to finish, she sat at the table beside her
students, directly beneath a colorful banner that proclaimed
her
very down-to-earth teaching philosophy: NO EXCUSES!
Speaking softly but firmly, and repeatedly using polite
terms of respect (such as “Please,” “Thank you,” and “If
you don’t mind”), Maull performed a skillful balancing
act that combined creative discussion with gentle reprimands
for inappropriate behavior (“Alicia, hands to yourself,
please—last warning!”)
Maull is passionate about her new life as a member of
the Teach For America corps. “Our stated objective is to close the
gap between low-income and high-income students,” she says. “We
believe that there will be a day when all children in this nation
have the ability to obtain an excellent education.”
Maull lives in a one-bedroom apartment a few blocks from
her school in Bedford-Stuyvesant. “Life
can be rough at times in Bed-Stuy, and it can be dangerous,” she explains. “But
it’s also a very vibrant community, with incredibly cultured and friendly
people. The kids in this community grow up with the good and the bad, and the
best we can do is to help them with whatever comes in their path.”
Growing up in the San Francisco suburbs, her parents struggled
hard to pay the bills but also made a great effort to teach
her the value
of
social responsibility.
She believes that is one of the reasons she was drawn to the Peace
Corps-like Teach For America program.
While studying the politics of race and gender at UCSD, she was
especially inspired as an undergraduate, she says, by the exemplary
teaching of
Thurgood Marshall College Dean of Student Affairs Ashanti Houston Hands, ’93: “She’s
an outstanding professional woman, but also a mother with a wonderful family. “I
learned a great deal from her,” she says, before heading off to teach
her next class at PS 25. “She was strong, she was thoughtful, she was
open to new ideas.”
Then she smiles and quotes Dean Hands quoting Gandhi, which she says
happened quite often during her years as an undergrad in San Diego.
"Be the change you wish to see in the world!”
Kathy Ha: “I Read
The Dalai Lama A Lot!”
 Kathy Ha, ’05, teaches English as a Second Language to
mostly Hispanic grade school children at Public School No. 278,
located in one of Harlem’s grittiest neighborhoods.
A former urban studies major at UCSD, the 23-year-old Ha, now
in the second year in the TFA program, revels in the challenge
of teaching low-income kids from Latin America. But it isn’t
easy. By the end of the school day, she often feels exhausted.
And she says there are moments when she wonders if she’ll
be able to make it all the way to four o’clock.
“Until I started teaching, I never knew I could yell so loud,” says
the San Francisco-area native, who wrote her UCSD senior thesis
on the art of teaching English to immigrant children in the U.S.
public school system, and then wound up actually doing it. “Every
once in a while, I’ll end up hollering at the top of my
lungs. I’d never imagined that those kinds of sounds could
come out of my body!”
Ha sometimes finds herself solving the kinds
of social problems that are an inevitable part of life in a low-income
neighborhood.
If a child is hungry,
she enrolls him in the school’s free breakfast program.
If a second-grader lacks clothes, she signs her up for a free
public-school clothing program.
In the worst cases—neglect, psychological abuse, physical
violence at home—she sends the child to the school counselor
for possible intervention by social services authorities in New
York City.
Regardless of the stress and turmoil involved in trying to
help solve thorny social problems, Ha says she’s heartened by
the knowledge that her students are making steady, measurable
progress in her classroom. “Sometimes, they tell me about
their lives . . . how eight or nine people are forced to live
in a one-bedroom apartment. That isn’t something I can
fix, not right away. But what I can do is make sure that that
child gets a chance to obtain an excellent education. I can help
remove the barriers. I can do food and clothes and transportation
to school—and if the kid doesn’t have a place to
study at night because there are problems at home, I can stay
after school with that child until all of his or her homework
is done correctly.”
A first-generation Korean-American, Ha says she became interested
in joining the teaching corps after taking some eye-opening courses
in urban studies at UCSD. “All at once, I began learning
about how 40 million Americans have no health insurance,” she
recalls. “I took courses that explored the housing problems
and the medical problems faced by low-income families.
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