Hatching Curiosity

After 51 years, Linda is retiring.

By Willa Cuthrell-Tuttleman ’16 Illustrations by Isabella Marcellino ’21

In my childhood bedroom, I sit cross-legged on the floor next to my phone and a glass of water. I had placed a call to someone I hadn’t talked to in about 13 years, and I was nervous, so I’d filled a glass of water to do something with my hands.

Someone picks up on the third ring.

“Hello?”

It’s Linda Chu, my third grade teacher, the longest tenured teacher in the history of the School. Her voice sounds exactly as it did when I was nine years old and in homeroom 3L.

Between now and then, between my college graduation in May over Zoom and incubating ducklings at the end of the second floor hall in elementary school, I felt as though most of my memories of third grade had been lost. Like most people, I don’t remember much of my experience in elementary school. But as Linda and I talk over the phone, the spatial arrangement of room 3L becomes clear to me in my mind: two tables sitting beneath two windows at the back of the classroom, the stick bug cage in the center of the room like a mantelpiece, the linoleum floor, the fluorescent lights, the pet turtle Molasses’s acrylic cage, and Linda’s table at the front of the room, where the other students and I would drop our finished math tests on multiplication tables. And for some reason, I briefly but vividly remember the smell.

Our conversation initially begins as small talk. Where are we isolating? Are we still in New York? We hope we’ve been staying safe. I think about the fact that, to me, she’s exactly the same, but somehow to her, I must seem drastically different. Linda and I share hobbies we’ve been picking up in isolation; I am trying to read more, she’s started obsessively baking. We catch up; I tell her about graduating college; she tells me that she’s been keeping Molasses, now 58 years old, in her apartment. Molasses unplugs the cable wires when let out of her cage.

“She’s really into yogurt now,” Linda laughs. “She gets it all over her cage and face, and then I have to give her a bath.”

When I was nine years old, feeding Molasses lettuce and strawberries was my favorite class chore. I have nothing new to add about the ways the pandemic has warped our sense of time, but talking about Molasses specifically, her enormous nails and tendency for making her water bowl dirty, makes me feel both extremely young and extremely old.

I ask Linda about her time leading up to Friends Seminary and the conversation takes a more serious turn. Linda Chu tells that she grew up in southern California, that she got her teaching degree with a minor in art and taught for a few years before joining the Peace Corps and moving to Sierra Leone. When Linda was my teacher, her life outside of the classroom was unknown to me; she was purely my teacher, a figure of authority and guidance. But talking to her now and hearing about her young life, I find myself cherishing these facts; listening to her feels as intimate and surprising as getting to know a new friend.

It was her experience in the Peace Corps that was most integral to her development as a teacher, and to discovering her values as an educator.

Two years after the Peace Corps, Linda and her husband moved to New York City. After teaching first at a day school, she broadened her search, and it was by fortuitous coincidence that she found a fit at Friends Seminary. In the 1970s, the School was more traditionally structured, but Linda felt that her encounter with Friends was fortunate in that she felt she emerged into the New York teaching world when education was changing, or was more open to changing.

Linda began as a co-teacher in the first grade and worked to introduce more collaborative and progressive ways of learning; ways that were modern and creative, that nurtured curiosity.

“In the 1970s, Friends didn’t have field trips,” Linda said. “Field trips are so important for kids. It’s important to observe, explore, to see things.”

Linda introduced the Nature’s Classroom visits to Friends, as a way for young students to have camping experiences, to learn about science and the environment, to learn how to compost, and to hike and connect with nature.

I remember my first Nature’s Classroom trip, but not the moments one might expect. The moments were specific and odd, like the fact that the garlic bread sticks served in the dining hall for dinner were the first to run out, the thrill of being grouped into the same dissection group as my close friends (we dissected a shark while the other group dissected a pig). I could probably recite the “Ort Report” from memory, a song that encouraged us to compost after meals in the dining hall. It was fall, the leaves were hard and crunchy, and it was cold.

As a third grade teacher, Linda continued to implement innovative and social ways of learning. She initiated a pen pal correspondence through which students write letters to Friends alumni. She introduced incubating young ducklings and chick eggs in the classroom until they hatch, and journaling observations on the classroom stick bugs she kept. She taught us how to weave a belt on a loom—mine was pale green with a pink stripe in the center—and she read to us all the time, as we crowded around her desk, near the end of the day. I remember that in Linda’s third grade classroom, she read me the first book that ever truly engaged me in an elementary school setting. She read us “Hugo.” I loved listening to Linda Chu read it to us, the specific way she characterized each character by the tone of her narrative voice. The vivid illustrations, the name George Melise, feels indelibly tied to her voice.

Linda teachers her final class at Friends.

Finally, I ask Linda what has inspired her to keep teaching.

“It’s always the reaction of the kids, watching the duck eggs hatching,” she says. “Just seeing awe and excitement on their face. It’s so inspiring, watching them discover something for the first time. Everytime they encounter something new, it never changes, the excitement they have; that’s what’s so rewarding about teaching.”

When I ask her if she’s always wanted to be a teacher, Linda says that she has, and that it was specifically teaching in the Peace Corps that strengthened her desire to be an educator. Teaching in the Peace Corps has had a formative effect on her philosophy and values about education. When she finally arrived at Friends, Linda says, it was a perfect fit.

“It was really Friends’ trust in me and the School’s willingness to try new educational techniques that was perfect for what I wanted to do,” she says. “It was a school that asked me, ‘what do you feel passionate about? What are you interested in teaching?’”

As a final question, I ask Linda if she remembers anything about me in particular when I was in her class.

Here, she pauses. I wonder briefly if she remembers her students as I remember my teachers, or if it’s different.

“You were a quiet student,” she said. “Quiet, but kind. And you liked to try new things. You weren’t hesitant about trying new things.”

When I think about her answer, taking stock of the past 40 minutes, what allowed me to thrive in her classroom was her talent in fostering creativity and curiosity. It is something I probably have always carried, and continue to carry, within myself in ways I don’t even realize. Back in her classroom, at nine years old, I was quiet, kind, perhaps curious. In 2020, 14 years later at 23, freshly graduated and trying to figure out my life path, I reflect on the values I brought to her class, and the values she’s passed to me. And what a beautiful thing it is for her to have found her place at Friends and for our paths to have intersected.