Carmen: Friend, colleague, creative disruptor

Labor Day, 1979. I was at my parents’ house, sharing lesson plans and ideas for my first day as a bilingual teacher in the Boston Public Schools (BPS). As a recently certified bilingual teacher in elementary education and social studies, I had hoped to land a job in a Spanish bilingual program, but the district’s human resources department apparently assumed I could teach in Portuguese as well as in Spanish, so they had hired me to teach high school science in a Cape Verdean bilingual program, taught in Portuguese. Although I’d taken no science in college and only studied Portuguese for a semester, I knew how difficult it was to land a job in BPS, so all summer I prepared, poring over children’s science books and an old general science high school textbook. The phone rang just as I finished sharing with my parents my ideas for teaching cell division. I picked it up and heard an accent that would become familiar in years to come. “Is Linder there please? This is Jim Bruno calling from the Boston Public Schools.”

“Yes, this is Linda,” I said, careful not to imitate his heavy Boston accent.

“Welcome aboard,” Mr. Bruno went on. “I’m the principal of the E Middle School and I’m pleased you’ll be joining us as the newest math teacher in our Spanish bilingual program.”