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Throughout his early experiences in school, Sam Dyson, Ed.M.’00, excelled only as a class clown and troublemaker, picking fist fights with other students after school. His outbursts were persistent and troublesome enough that some of his early teachers lost faith in him. On his graduation day, one of Dyson’s elementary school teachers approached him in tears. “She was sure I wasn’t going to make it to high school, let alone graduate. She thought I would end up in jail,” he says. Instead, he graduated with distinction, went on to study physics at Yale, to teach in South Africa, and, then, to work at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
At age 15, a vital link between school and the real world revealed itself to Dyson. His Spanish teacher’s insistence on vocabulary memorization seemed tedious and meaningless to him until the day he engaged in a friendly conversation with Spanish-speaking people at his local market. That same year he read The Grapes of Wrath in English class and realized that literature provides insight into the struggles of the human condition. “For the first time, school became a way of coming to know the world, rather than simply an assignment,” he says. Now as a teacher of both physics and Zulu culture at the Walter Payton College Prep magnet school in Chicago, Dyson helps students forge deep connections between their learning experiences and the real world. In his physics class, students build instruments so they can witness the creation of sound waves. In his Zulu class, students do not simply memorize grammatical structures, they stand up and speak to one another in a manner that reveals the larger cultural meaning behind words. “As I teach them about African culture, I’m prodding them to recognize how the expressions they use in their own language say something about who they are and what they value.” In Dyson’s own words, this sort of “universe-expanding connection” reveals education’s true purpose.
Dyson begins the school term with the concept umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu—an expression that means a person is a person because of his or her relationship with other people. These words poignantly point toward the difference he believes a teacher can make in a student’s life. And his students make it clear that he is doing just that. When he decided to pilot his Zulu class, he assumed that only a small group of students would be interested—nearly one-fourth of the school’s student body clamored to enroll. “I teach subjects I’m drawn to,” he says, “but my primary goal is to teach young people how to be learners and how to teach themselves.” After all the frustration students undergo to learn a language for which they have no reference point, and a science that pushes many people to bewilderment, Dyson offers his students a debt of gratitude. “I let them know how much I appreciate their efforts, because I know very well that they have a choice. They can come in here and behave the way I once did—but instead they choose to be thoughtful and patient, even when the answers seem invisible to them.” About the Article
HGSE News, Harvard Graduate School of Education
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