1980s-2000s
Selected photos of Umi during her over 20-year tenure as a New York City public school teacher.
Notes: Umi was first licensed to teach in NYC in 1975. Her first appointment in an NYC public school was in 1980 and she retired in 2008. Her longest tenure was teaching ESL at Intermediate School 320 in Brooklyn (Edwidge Danticat was one of her students!) and she also taught high school Spanish. If you look at the Rosa Parks photo, you can get a sense of the kinds of lessons she brought to her classroom. On the white sticky paper, questions include: What striking memory did Rosa McCauley Parks have as a young child regarding her treatment as a black girl? Why was/is Tuskegee institute so significant in Black history? This photo is from her final position in NYC public schools, where she taught global history, American history, geography, and literacy to “at risk” youth. At risk is in quotation marks because there should be no stigma attached to youth and clearly Umi thought so by how she was teaching them.