One of my earliest memories is of my maternal grandmother who would write in her notepad, and I would weave in and out of completing logic puzzles and running around the yard.
At the time, I thought of the activity as a game of answer these questions about shapes and order, then, go run around the flowers, in which each activity was a reward for the other. I did not realize my mother and grandmother actually were using these notes to create experiential and data-driven early education programs for preschoolers.
Coming from a family of educators, my maternal great-grandparents were high school math teachers and district leaders in India. My great-grandfather took a highly controversial first step. He threw away traditions and allegiances to patriarchy, he stood deftly in the face of criticism and ridicule, and he took the miraculous and radically simple step of educating his daughter, my grandmother.
Such bravery paid off. My grandmother had completed high school by age 12. At age 16, she had earned her master’s degree in philosophy from a prestigious university in India. Later, she earned her doctorates from Columbia University. That superhuman, accelerated pace is something I have always admired.
Growing up, I knew I was in a learning environment. Sure, the preschool had the logic games and puzzles, the toys that taught critical thinking, the art teachers who taught beauty through math, and the math teachers who taught us that math is majestic. I saw the final results, the products of my mom’s and my grandmother’s labor. I also saw behind the scenes.
My mom and grandmother would speak endlessly of the rule of threes, how to unlearn a behavior, and how to correct bad behavior by focusing on the act and not the person. My grandmother’s dream was to open a school of her own. One with the freedom to teach to the child. One informed not by punishments and rewards but by relentless peer reviews and through scouring neuroscience articles on learning and child development.
The thoughtful, meticulously designed curriculum I enjoyed as a student at Self Development Preschool was STEM-centered before there was this fashionable marketing product. We did math problems in roman numerals, and designed weather experiments by testing them on building structures. At the preschool’s summer program, my 12-year-old self asked a teacher, “Didn’t we study weather and climate last summer?” The teacher responded, “Yep, but this year we will learn how Greek Myths were informed by weather and climate.”
Over the next few years, I would come back to the preschool to work with the children. One of the truly humbling features of this summertime work was that I was working for Vernetta Madsen and Rachel Hunt. Vernetta is director of the preschool and overall master of all trades. Rachel is a brilliant science teacher who has functioned as a close advisor to my mom on pedagogical issues since the 1980s. They are two tirelessly dedicated individuals who formed such an integral part of my upbringing that they fall inside some category between an aunt and mother. I don’t care what genetics says. They are my family.
They were able to convince me to do the right thing. They were able to wade through the age difference and speak to me like a wise friend—it was time to work on my science report, it was time to eat my beets.
During my freshman year at Vassar, my mom, Vernetta, Rachel and my dad opened their first charter school in 2000 with just 37 students. The school was built around the same philosophy the preschool was built upon—every child learns if we make it hard enough and if we make it fun enough.
The core Self Development group (Vernetta, Rachel, Christina Harguess, and my dad) got to work to open a school in a highly disadvantaged area in Phoenix, using the Mesa campus as a model. At the time, I was living in Washington, D.C., having just finished law school. I worked with the staff on a grant for the school, and felt that stir of excitement around the idea of working for something larger than yourself.
In early 2016, my mom came to visit my sister and me in Washington, D.C. On a gray morning, she sat lost in a pensive brooding as she swirled her milk in her tea with a spoon. She proceeded to tell me that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. I took that in unwillingly. Then, I remembered an eerie similarity. My grandmother had died of cancer at about the same age as my mom when she contracted breast cancer.
My mom has built three successful businesses. There was no way that life’s twisted sense of humor, that mere coincidence and symbolism would shake my mom’s indefatigable desire to educate the impoverished. Nonetheless, I believe it did allow my mom to confront her own mortality, to embrace the natural arc of life.
She tapped the side of her cup firmly with her spoon and she asked me, “Will you move back home to Phoenix? Will you help me?”
I can’t say I wasn’t conflicted. I loved my life in D.C. I was close to so many museums, buildings of knowledge and history, of art and innovation. I was in the process of going back to school to receive my doctorate’s degree in social psychology to work in academia. I wanted to remain surrounded by culture and the pursuits of knowledge. But it soon dawned on me, isn’t that same culture at Self Development Academy? Didn’t my mom teach me to value those things? Isn’t that exactly what she tries to inculcate in her students? Weren’t her campuses mini communities of scholars and artists?
After that revelation, it didn’t take long for me to make the decision to move back. Sure, I was going to miss walking everywhere, the cleaner air and the humidity. But what I would lose in the minor conveniences and niceties I would more than make up for in feeling deeply rewarded.
That last part has proven true. As I write this, I had to tell my small pullout group I was not going to be able to work with them this week. My heart broke because all weekend I had been creating lesson plans in my head. I was trying to figure out how this student, if pushed in this way, could bring out this other student. They seemed disappointed, too. In the past few weeks, we’ve grown to appreciate the few hours we have together, and I feel as though I know their brains—what could make them eat beets, how to get them to write their science reports.
These moments with the children—I have been on all sides of it. I have been the child. I have been on the outside watching the adults learn how to handle those moments. I am now the adult in that moment. It is my own arc curving toward the path on which it was always meant to be, a path that began generations ago.
For more information regarding Self Development Academy, or to arrange a tour, call (480) 641-2640, or send an email to info@self-dev.com.