Mr. Saunders’ college experience included a first look into parenthood– starting with a raccoon hit and run. From his off-campus house, he witnessed a raccoon being hit by a car. Thankfully, Mr. Saunders “lived next to one of the biology professors and she went out and tried to save the raccoon, which was pregnant.” Despite an epic effort, the mother raccoon didn’t make it. However, one of its babies did, and Mr. Saunders took it in. “We named the raccoon Pam because I thought it was funny and we thought it was a girl raccoon. It was not,” Saunders said. But, he soon came to realize he was unprepared. “Little did I know what I was getting into; learning to toddler proof my house, literally having to go to Target and buy like toddler locks for all the doors because raccoons can open anything, they have hands,” Saunders explained. Pam was quite the party animal, making appearances at frat parties and often being spotted cruising around campus. Ultimately, after a year of having a raccoon sidekick, campus security caught on, and Mr. Saunders sadly had to part with Pam the raccoon.
Mr. Rees remembers exactly where he was when Harvard called to say he was accepted off the waitlist. “I was sitting in my friend’s car on some Friday heading I won’t say where from Garfield in Spring,” Rees recalled. Like many of his fellow seniors, Mr. Rees was neck-deep in the college admissions process and this call came at just the right time. After receiving the good news, Mr. Rees contacted the newly hired soccer coach, who had previously recruited him for a different school. He was invited to try out and ended up walking onto the Harvard soccer team, playing midfield and forward throughout his 4-year college career. During his first two years there, Mr. Rees says Harvard soccer was “one of the best teams in the country,” beating ACC teams and most memorably, beating Stanford.
Lawnmower. Grocery bagger. Ski instructor. Mr. Truax had many jobs before becoming a teacher at Garfield. The most impactful one, however, was his time in the Peace Corps in Togo. He remembers receiving a letter in the mail that said “You’re going to Togo, you’re in a program called Animal Traction.” He had to look it up on a map and research “what the heck Animal Traction was.” But according to Truax, he realized he “ended up in a really lucky spot, in a beautiful place in West Africa.” In Togo, Mr. Truax built communal mud stoves and helped cash crop farmers navigate the cotton industry. Now, in his classroom, he has maps and artwork like his prized batik wall-hanging that he brought back from Togo as a cherished memory and reminder of the work he did in the Peace Corps.
Jeremiah Firman was on a four-week retreat in Tamil Nadu, India training to become a yoga teacher when he came across a group of macaque monkeys. Firman was resting on a roof when the monkeys started to approach him. Macaques are normally comfortable around humans, but as they got closer he got increasingly nervous. In an attempt to calm them, he started playing “Big Black Car” by Gregory Alan Isakov on his guitar. The monkeys began to fall asleep, but anytime the music stopped, they would wake up and come closer. Firman continued to serenade them until he and his friends safely made it off the roof. Looking back on it now, Firman recalls the experience as being “playfully scary” and that he was “honored that they found my music good enough to allow them to sleep.” Although Firman hasn’t taught yoga professionally since 2016, he still uses those skills in his job today. “…[M]indfulness and being in the moment is a really important part of teaching high schoolers,” Firman said with a laugh.
As a junior in his southern Californian high school, Mr. Nomura was crowned the fastest donut eater in the world. The school hosted a Guinness world record picnic with different food-based competitions and Nomura chose the donut category. The goal was to eat a dozen donuts as fast as possible. Nomura was in second, when the frontrunner was caught sneaking his donuts to his friends under the table and was disqualified. Eating the dozen in two minutes and thirty seconds, Nomura thought he claimed his rightful spot as the fastest donut eater. Unfortunately, due to a lack of judges, he did not get the official world record he was longing for. Today, he enjoys the occasional donut but, “can’t eat them like that anymore because I’m not like a teenager.” According to Nomura, his favorite place in Seattle to get the dessert is Mighty-O-Donuts.
Daniel Young’s “brush with death” occurred in Peru during his year of traveling around the world–a tale he passionately tells his students every year. On his way to Ecuador, after volunteering at an orphanage to teach Peruvian students English, hygiene, and art, Young was on a bus with around forty other passengers when a band of gunmen jumped up. One held the driver at gunpoint and told him to “keep the bus moving” while the rest walked the aisle seizing travelers’ belongings, including Mr. Young’s cash and camera. The thieves then made their getaway- luckily no one was hurt. Traumatic experience aside, , Young remembers the time he spent in South America fondly and the impact it had on his career choice. “I didn’t decide [what I wanted to be] until after that year of travel. I thought about teaching because of that volunteering experience,” Mr. Young reflected.
