Uma Nambiar and Julie Noh
When Julie and I sat down to interview Grace, the oldest substitute teacher in America at 90 years old, the first thing she told us was that she grew up in Yakima, Washington in a small farming town called Selah. Having grown up on a farming community, school started two weeks earlier than usual because of the apple harvest season. In 1957 at age 27, she began teaching at Shoreline High School where the baby boomers were just starting high school. Schools were looking for teachers to hire due to a shortage of staff, and wages were 3,750 dollars per year, making it clear how staggering inflation has been over the years.
Grace began teaching when McCarthyism was a prominent part of American life. She revealed that into the 1960s, all teachers had to take an oath that they were not, and never had been, members of the communist party in order to teach in Washington. When she was teaching US honors, she had her history students read “Looking Backward” by Edward Bellamy and “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair. There was a mother who showed concern with the books Grace had her students read because the authors were socialist. To sort things out, Grace, the mother, and the principal met for an hour one day. The mother said, “You think we’re dumb farmers from Eastern Washington.” Grace decided not to tell her that she herself was from Eastern Washington and her father was a farmer.
Tensions were high in politics as well; a liberal, democratic man called Goldmark had a wife who had joined the communist party, and people assumed that was a communist as well. As a result, a campaign was started to make sure he would not be reelected. In 1976, John Goldmark Jr, an attorney in Seattle, he and his wife and two children were killed and he was referred to in the Seattle Times as a “man off of the streets” because he was suspected of being a part of the world communist conspiracy.
From the time Grace started teaching to now, there have been significant changes in school systems, such as the access to technology we have and an increase in class options. She feels that technology, although distracting to students at times, is beneficial because of how it allows easy access to information. In her third year of teaching, she was asked to create a Senior Honors Social Study Class and went to Stanford on a scholarship to create the curriculum. This type of hands-on creation of curriculum does not happen much anymore; curriculum decisions would more likely be decided by a committee, but she had the opportunity to select the books and resources her class would use. She agreed that the amount of student debt college students have nowadays is staggering, and she would love to see free college, especially for lower-income students. Mental health issues are acknowledged much more in schools now, and she felt that this was a gradual change.
Grace was very much in support of desegregation and felt impressed by the Civil Rights Movement as well as JFK’s administration. She mentioned that in Yakima, people of color generally stayed on the East Side of town. Once, when a family of color tried to move into her town, a man in the neighborhood put up a fence and painted it black. This discouraged the family from trying to integrate into the neighborhood and is indicative of the struggles black families faced only a few decades ago. When we asked if she knew any teachers who hadn’t supported the Civil Rights Movement, she said nobody had ever expressed opposing views.
Grace’s most memorable experience from teaching was JFK’s assassination. Her classroom had the only TV in the entire school, and when the news was announced, everyone went quiet. The senior prom that was supposed to happen that Saturday got canceled, and she spent that weekend glued to the TV. In her personal life, she enjoys taking care of her granddaughter’s animals, which includes four weasels, a hedgehog, a budgie with a broken wing, and a snake. Her advice to teachers and students alike is to do your best, take time to relax, and keep asking questions.
