The Teacher Who Changed My Life PDF

The Tea che r Who Cha nge d My Life Nicholas Gage The person who sec the course of my life in the new land I entered as a young war refugee-who, in face, nearly dragged me onto the path that would bring...

The Tea che r Who Cha nge d My Life Nicholas Gage The person who sec the course of my life in the new land I entered as a young war refugee-who, in face, nearly dragged me onto the path that would bring What dOM this all the blessings I've received in America-was a salty-tongued, no-nonsense photograph suggest schoolteacher named Marjorie Hurd. When I entered her classroom in 1953, about the relationship I had been to six schools in five years, starting in the Greek village where I was between Nicholas Gage born in 1939. and Miss Hurd after he When I stepped off a ship in New York Harbor on a gray March day in @ became an adult? 1949, I was an undersized 9-year-old in short pants who had lost his mother Targeted Passage and was coming to live with the father he didn't know. My mother, Eleni 1 10 Gatwyiannis, had been imprisoned, tortured and shot by Communist guerrillas for sending me and three of my four sisters to freedom. She died so that her children could go to their father in the United States. The portly, bald, well-dressed man who met me and my sisters seemed a foreign, authoritarian figure. I secretly resented him for not getting the whole family out of Greece early enough to save my mother. Ultimately, I would grow to love him and appreciate how he dealt with becoming a single parent at the age of 56, but at first our relationship was prickly, full of hostility. O 0 CHARACTERIZATION IN NONFICTION As Father drove us to our new home-a tenement in Worcester, Mass.-and What methods of pointed out the huge brick building chat would be our first school in America, characterization doei 20 I clutched my Greek notebooks from the refugee camp, hoping that my few Gage use to e"plain his years of schooling would impress my teachers in this cold, crowded country. Initial impression of his father? They didn't. When my father led me and my l )-year-old sister co Greendale Elementary School, the grim-faced Yankee principal put the two of us in a 1. Elenl Gatzoylannl1 (l!-ll!'nii gilt'zO-yi!n'Ts). 228 UNI T 2 : C HARACTll R O llV l!LO PM E NT DIFFERJNTIA TED INSTRUCTIO N FOR ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNERS FOR STRUGGLING READERS Vocabulary Support Use Definition Mapping In combination with the Audio Anthology CD, 228 to teach these words: principal (line 23),facil- use one or more Targeted Passages (pp. ity (line 24), graded (line 27), immigrant (line 231, 234) to ensure that students focus on key  ,. i J I i j ) j, j 1...,-.. I J ~ l _;J ' I ) Nicholas G494 a.Ml his faMily at th4 harbor i11 PirlUIIS, Gruu, ready to ut wt for the U,,;tuJ States 1._, _,..,,. __,, _, -· ~" - _,,,,.,,...,._,,,,.......,,.,,,-.,,<....,;,....,,.,,,......,.....,.._,,,.~ ---"'~_;.._,,.. --" _,,. class for the mentally retarded. There was no facility in those days for non- English-speaking children. By the time I met Marjorie Hurd four years later, I had learned English, been placed in a normal, graded class and had even been chosen for the college preparatory track in the Worcester public school system. I was 13 years old when our father moved us yet again, and I entered Chandler Junior High 30 shortly after the beginning of seventh grade. I found myself surrounded by richer, smarter and better-dressed classmates, who looked askance at my strange clothes and heavy accent. Shortly after I arrived, we were cold to select a hobby co pursue during "club hour" on Fridays. The idea of hobbies and clubs made no sense to my immigrant ears, but I decided co follow the prettiest girl in my class- the blue-eyed daughter of the local Lutheran minister. She led me through the door marked "Newspaper C lub" and into the mentor (men't6r'l n. presence of Miss Hurd, the newspaper adviser and English teacher who would a wise and trusted become my mentor and my muse. counselor or teacher A formidable, solidly built woman with salt-and-pepper hair, a steely eye N 40 and a flat Boston accent, Miss Hurd had no patience with layabouts. ~What 0 CHARACTERIZATIO IN NONFICTION are all you goof-offs doing here?" she bellowed at the would-be journalists. Why might Gage h_ave "This is the Newspaper Club! We' re going to put ouc a newspaper. So if there's chosen to quot e MISS. rd s ,n anybody in chis room who doesn't like work, I suggest you go across to the Hurd's actual wo Glee Club now, because you're going co work your rails off here!" 0 this paragraph ? 230 U NIT 2 : C HARA C T E R D EV ELO PME NT  ·----=-::.-::c~::;,:::r.;;;:r-;-:~ ~~;;r;~;;r;:~::-:-: ::~~ ~-:-----i..:O Targeted Passage ·was S(lll l1 un er M iss ur s spe. e t 111 ee teac 1 us to put out a ( COMMON CORE 114 er skills I honed during my next 25 years as a journalist. Soon I asked neWSPa P ' L anguage C oac h rhe rincipal ro transfer me to her English class as well. There, she drilled P ram mar until I finaJly began to understand the logic and structure Idioms The phrase usof thone gEnglish language. She assigned stories for us to_ read and discuss; not "under Miss Hurd's k h J kn b f d d spell," In line 45, Is an -'es of heroes, like the Gree myt s ew, ut stones o un er ogs- poor ldlom,oraflgureof ° 5 Cat. pie, even immigrants, w ho seemed ord'mary untt·1 a cnsts.. drove th em to speech that Isn't meant ro°someching extraordinary. She also introduced us to the literary wealth to be taken literally. of Greece-giving me a new perspective on my war-ravaged, impoverished How did the narrator feel about Miss Hurd? ho meland. I began co be proud o f my ongms. D Why do you think ne ay, a er tscussmg ow wnters s ou write a out w at t ey ow, hechosetodescrlbe she assigned us to compose an essay from our own experience. Fixing me with his feelings with this a seem look, she added, "Nick, I want you to write about what happened idiom? co your family in Greece." I had been trying to put those painful memories behind me and left the assignment until the last moment. Then, on a warm D AUTHOR'S PURPOSE Reread lines 45- 54. 60 spring afternoon, I sat in my room with a yellow pad and pencil and stared out Which details support che window at the buds on the trees. I wrote that the coming of spring always Gage's purpose of reminded me of the last time I said goodbye to my mother on a green and gold explaining Miss Hurd's day in 1948. Influence on him? Nie.ho/as 649& (top row, u,rl-cr) w;th his third-tyada t.lass ) J J J I J J I I J I J J J J J I } I ) I J [ J I THE TEA C HER WHO C HAN GP.D MY Liff. 231  I kept writing, one line after another, telling how the Communist guerrillas r·.. occupied our village, took our home and food, how my mother stancd COIIWoN ~11!4 [__· ·.../ planning our escape when she learned that the children were to be sent to 8 READING re-education camps2 behind the Iron Cunain 3 and how, at the last moment, Awriter'ssynu d"cti x alld she couldn't escape with us because the guerrillas sent her with a group of , on, or sentence women to thresh wheat in a distant village. She promised she would try to structure and Word choice, help reveal h· 70 get away on her own, she told me to be brave and hung a silver cross around her fee.ings about t~II O! my neck, and then she kissed me. I watched the line of women being led subject.' look~ lines down into the ravine and up the other side, until they disappeared around the 64-6g, in which Gage bend-my mother a tiny brown figure at the end who stopped for an instant uses a long, flowing sentence to describe to raise her hand in one last farewell. 8 the events in Gretc'- I wrote about our nighttime escape down the mountain, across the How does this syntax minefields and into the lines of the Nationalist soldiers, who sent us to a refugee reflect what Gage was camp. It was there that we learned of our mother's execution. I felt very lucky to experiencing as he wr~, have come to America, I concluded, but every year, the coming of spring made me feel sad because it reminded me of the last time I saw my mother. so I handed in the essay, hoping never to see it again, but Miss Hurd had it published in the school paper. This mortified me at first, until I saw that my classmates reacted with sympathy and tact to my family's story. Without tact (takt) n. an telling me, Miss Hurd also submitted the essay to a contest sponsored by the understanding of the proper thing to do Of say Freedoms Foundation at Valley Forge, Pa., and it won a medal. The Worcester around others paper wrote about the award and quoted my essay at length. My father, by then a "five-and-dime-store chef," as the paper described him, was ecstatic with pride, and the Worcester Greek community celebrated the honor to one of its own. 0 0 GRAMMARAND STI"~ For the first rime I began to understand the power of the written word. A Reread lines 82-88. Notice how Gage uses 90 secret ambition rook root in me. One day, I vowed, I would go back to Greece, the concrete noun medal find out the details of my mother's death and write about her life, so her and abstract nouns sucb grandchildren would know of her courage. Perhaps I would even track down as pride and honor to che men who killed her and write of their crimes. Fulfilling that ambition describe responses to his essay. would cake me 30 years. Meanwhile, I followed rhe literary path chat Miss Hurd had so forcefully set me on. Afrer junior high, I became the editor of my school paper at Classical High School and got a pare-time job at the Worcester Telegram and Gazette. Although my father could only give me $50 and encouragement toward a college education, I managed to finance four years at Boston University with 100 scholarships and pa.re-time jobs in journalism. During my last year of college, an article I wrote about a friend who had died in the Philippines- the first person to lose his life working for the Peace Corps-led to my winning the Hearst Award for College Journalism. And the plaque was given to me in the White House by President John F. Kennedy. 2. re-education a ~ : camps where people were forced to go to be Indoctrinated with Communist Ide.is and beliefs. 3. behind the Iron Curtain: on the Communist side of the imaginary divide between the democracies of Western Europe and the Communist dictatonhlps of Eastern Euro~ In this cue, the umps were In Albania. 232 UN IT 1: C HARACTER DEVELOPMENT DIFFERENTIATED INSTRUCTION  ing For a refugee ~ho had nev~r see~ a motorized vehicle or indoo r plumb paper unril he was 9, this was an umma gmabl e honor. When the Worcester rushed out ran a picture of me standi ng next co President Kennedy, my father tulations co buy a new suit in order to be proper ly dressed to receive the congra of the Worcester Greeks. He clipped out the photo graph , had it laminated in plastic and carried it in his breast pocke t for the rest of his life to show 110 day he everyone he met. I found the much- worn photo in his pocket on the died 20 years later. 0 0 CHARACTERIZATION IN NONFI CTION Jn our isolated Greek village, my mothe r had bribed a cousin to teach her What do the father's age. co read, for girls were not suppo sed co attend school beyond a certain actions tell you about his couldn 't She had always dream ed of her childr en receiving an education. She feelings for his son? came be there when I gradu ated from Boston University, but the person who rie Hurd. We Isolated (i's~la'tTd) adj. with my father and shared our joy was my former teacher, Marjo separated from others paid my celebrated not only my bache lor's degree but also the scholarships chat woman way to Colum bia's Gradu ate Schoo l of Journa lism. There , I met the eventually becom e my wife. At our weddi ng and at the baptism s 110 who would of our three childr en, Marjo rie Hurd was always there, dancing alongside the Greeks. she By then, she was Mrs. Rabidou, for she had married a widower when ucing was in her early 40s. That didn 'r discracr her from her vocation of introd 41 years young minds to English literat ure, however. She caught for a coral of Nicho las~ (JcFV r6"Nill9 tM Hurst Award Frt1111 Praidu t l