G Block (Ayesha)

"I was seven, and my dad contracted pink eye. He gave it to me, and I had a weird reaction to it. The next morning, my parents rushed me to the hospital. I was also dehydrated from this, and they put IVs in me, and all I could do for a week was just lie in bed. The nurses would always try to play games with me to cheer me up, but they had no idea what I had. They had to wake me up throughout the night a lot of times. So the time I was there, I never got a full night's rest. They would give me shots in the middle of the night. One thing that was cool was I got to watch Zootopia before its release. They were probably giving me the good food. Eventually, they figured out it was from, and it was a super rare condition. I got home from the hospital, and my whole family was there to see me, and I got presents. I was mad because my sisters got better presents for me than me. I don't even know why they got presents, 'cause they weren't in the hospital. So that changed my perspective on life, because why did they get presents? What the heck? I was the one dying, guys. One time the IV yanked my arm and hurt tons."

"So, when I arrived at Sandy Spring friends school, I wasn’t so much looking for something, as I was hoping to build something. When I arrived in August of 1995, then only 25 years old, and married for two weeks, I was fortunate to discover three important mentors. Ari worked at Sandy Spring for 40+ years, and for me it's very important that his memory be kept alive. I was determined to never let him down. Ari is an inspiration, and if there were a mount rushmore of SSFS faculty, he would certainly be among them. Dr. Smith also took me under his wing. I was full of ideas and hope, I was raw material that needed to be molded, and Dr. Smith demonstrated grace and patience with me and helped shape me into the educator I've become today. Bob is just one of the best teachers I've ever seen and to have him so proximate to me just across the hall for 25 years was the greatest gift a teacher could have. To be able to call Bob a friend of mine is a real privilege. He would be another carving the SSFS Mount Rushmore! So over the years what I have found, what I have been privileged to help co create, it is exactly what I had hoped for. I found students here willing to grow and challenge themselves, colleagues who inspire me, and a school that has allowed me to live out my deepest educational convictions."

"One struggle I had in my life was coming out. I was in a very supportive, loving, kind home. My parents were always supportive of everything I did. So when they figured out I was dating a woman in college, I was taken aback that they didn’t support me. They were so kind and loving, so it threw me off because I expected that love, care, and support. I never experienced that kind of rejection from people who were close to me. It was a long journey, years of heartache between my family and me. Ultimately, I had to say, this is who I am. If you want me to come home and visit, you need to accept whoever I’m with, and they need to be welcomed. That was a turning point in our relationship. They had this transformation of feeling like it was possible to have this deep kindness and relationship with whoever I was with. Now it’s awesome because they’re P flag supporters, which is parents and friends of lesbians and gays. They’re the kinds of people who would be out at a march, advocating for the rights of other people. It’s awesome to feel like we’ve come full circle. They deeply love my partner, we had our wedding at their house with all of our friends. At that time, there was a lot going on in the world that kept them from fully accepting me at that time."

"I was in the military. I joined the Marine Corps when I was 17, deployed when I was 19, and I had friends pass away in combat. I had unfortunately two friends, that are tattooed on my arm, pass away, one due to suicide, and one was a police officer after the military, and got into a car accident chasing after a suspect. For me, dealing with the loss of people close to me has been a struggle. The guy that ended up taking his own life was my roommate and best friend, and it's a bit heavy, but thats something that I feel like I carry with me because we talked all the time, I lived with him, I knew everything about him, he knew everything about me. After we got out of the military - he got out a couple months before I did - unfortunately, he ended up taking his life in 2017. I know there's nothing I probably could have done. But he messaged me two days before his suicide and asked me for pictures from deployment. I carried a lot of guilt because I didn't give them to him right away. It has made me realize that like, you don't know what people are going through, you don't know why people are going through things. So if someone asks you to do something, asks something of you, I think it's important to just do it. And it was because I was lazy, I hold guilt for it."

"I got to SSFS by a six hour interview with a teaching lesson. Which is probably the toughest class you have to teach, cause you don’t know the students, you don’t know the school. You don’t really know anything, so it’s really challenging. But I think your question really is why did I choose to come to SSFS. And, I’ve taught high school Spanish in other places. I was in the peace corps in Honduras and I worked as a consultant in construction. But I wanted to be a part of a community where the goal was more than just teaching Spanish, to teach students about life and to learn from my students. So to be a part of an inclusive community that's intentional, very intentional about inclusivity, and certainly a community where academics are important. Another thing that I was interested in is the level of the arts here. I’ve worked at a couple different schools and the music and arts programs were far less developed, far fewer opportunities, I think it is a fantastic aspect of the school. I mean, personally I wanted to be closer to my family, I wanted to be able to spend more time with them. I wasn’t casting a wide net, 'cause I didn’t want to go to just any school, I wanted to come to a place that I really felt I could become a contributing member of a community that really is a community in so many wonderful ways."

"What got me interested in math to begin with - I’m a math teacher - was my second grade teacher. I did like math in the first place, but that made me feel very, very special about math. Along the same lines, another sister - I went to a Catholic school - was excellent teaching math. These are usually women, interesting enough; this sister was definitely someone that helped me keep lovin' math, and was nurturing about it. I thought I wanted to teach, because I really liked teaching, I loved organizing games for kids, I just thought, teaching would be good. And then I had some really good teachers. It was very hands on, on how you teach kids, children, how to learn math. And that was fascinating, and I made stuff, different things so that I could use them in my classroom, and, for this course, she was excellent. The woman that was in charge of that program, Title I, was a very good mentor. And she would also have workshops for teachers. So I would go in, and I just loved 'em, very hands on. And I loved it! I loved how children learn about that stuff. But the math people were all women. So, knowing that I could be, you know a math teacher. I’m very proud of it. Yeah. I love, love, love doing it."

"There's just so many things that come with art appreciation - even just being able to see the world with fresh eyes. And I find that I'm a much more flexible thinker. I can come up with solutions to things really quickly or have multiple solutions because I'm used to working that part of my brain all of the time. Years ago I had a student when I was teaching at George Washington University who took photography because they had an art requirement and he was really intimidated by drawing and painting, so photography was kind of like his ‘in’ into art. But he didn’t really want to be there, because it was a requirement. So, I spent the entire semester trying to convince him that he wanted to be there. And at the end he thanked me because he realized that he had a gift for something that he never would have tried before - an appreciation for other people’s photography too, ‘cause now he knew what went into it. He walked away from it being surprised in himself, in a positive way. Those are the kind of things that make me keep doing it even though people don’t always appreciate it right away like I do."

"My dad was sick. He died three years ago. He was sick for 5 years before he died. I was his primary carer. He had a heart attack, then he had a stroke. It was this unknown. He had to learn to walk again. That role of daughter and father flipped. Life was scary. He was still sharp but it did impact his memory. It was learning to soften and not have the same expectations. I would just be happy that I could go and share time with him. I became more accepting. He made really good progress. It was not long after it was diagnosed that his cancer came back. So then, it was the unpredictableness of when he was going to pass. There was no timeline. The stress level was higher than I was capable of handling. There wasn't an option to not keep going. I had a friend who had been down a road with her mother-in-law who had been sick for a long time. I would talk to her; she said, “It's a marathon, just remember, it's a marathon.” Having somebody who said that helped me realize that I have to be accepting of it, 'cause I can't change it. My dad passed away early on a Sunday morning. It was a lesson in I could be going through something that felt stressful but still stay connected to friends. Community makes such a difference. Family is bigger than a lot of times I used to think."

"Four or so years ago, I had to move to another house; it was difficult because I really liked our old house, as I could walk to my elementary school from it. Our new house did have some better things; for example, it is larger and is closer to the middle schools I wanted to go to. But it was also worse in some ways; for example it has almost no backyard and most rooms don't have doors separating them from other rooms. Additionally the new house had some challenges; for example one or two years after we moved in the basement flooded. During heavy rain, the water pump had failed, and water was pouring through the basement to outside door; we managed to save some things, like the TV and some board/card games, but many things were lost. And after that we discovered that the dishwasher was leaking and we had to get someone to fix it."

"I came to the States because my mom was getting her PhD. We lived in Rhode Island, and when my mom finished her PhD she wanted to go back to Ghana; however, I had missed such a large portion of Ghanaian education that even though I was going into the tenth grade in the State, I would have been put back into 8th grade, because I had not taken any of the tests to go on to the next level. We looked for boarding schools along the east coast and a friend suggested trying Quaker schools, so we looked at Sandy Spring. It was a great experience coming here. My family decided this is where I'm going to school. Eduardo was my coach, Ari was my guardian. When I went to college, I came back every year.  Every year, I came back for the alumni game, I came back for alumni celebrations at the end of the year,  so this was a second home to me. During breaks, I would come in and have conversations with Ari and Nancy, sometimes on campus with them."

"When I was seven or something - at the time I was taking allergy shots - my allergies were debilitating. My eyes were just, like, covered in pus, and I would get really itchy. I kept getting shots for like two years, in like 2017-2019, then COVID hit and we stopped. This time was a little different; my doctor decided to be an evil doctor and they gave me super allergies. And they gave me three allergy shots of a medication four times as potent as what I was taking. I got in the car; my mom was driving me to practice, and I was like, "Mom, I'm a little itchy," and then she was like, "Oh, you'll be fine," and I said, “MOM I can’t breathe!" She ran like three red lights and made like several illegal U-turns. We got there, they fireman-style, like, grabbed my legs and then they grabbed my arms. I was dead, basically. My heart stopped; they defibrillated me. I came back to life and then they gave me a lot of epinephrine. I was kinda freaking out, and they strapped me to the table And like, it was fine though. That really showed me how fragile life is, and that life it can just... you can like, trip and fall and like, die. I did not hold a grudge, because they got fired 'cause they killed me. I didn’t really care that the doctor got fired. I was just happy I was alive."

“The Gratitude Museum is one of my favorite things that I've done. I feel like when it comes to gratitude even in my own life that can be really hard to get to because there's so much that happens in this world. But to be able to teach young children how to be grateful and how to practice gratitude is really fun. Then to have it end in an event that they're celebrating with their teachers or their parents, but I feel like seeing it come to life was awesome. The Gratitude Museum was supposed to be a first grade group putting things they're grateful for every day up on a wall then other lower schoolers were going to walk through the lower school to the hallway to see it. We designed it the year that we had come back from COVID, then nobody could interact with each other. Do we do this again next year? Every year of having to do that for the Gratitude Museum to make sure that it's been three years and hopefully more. I think that's a huge part of anything that goes wrong in my life. I always breathe, try to figure out what's next before I say that's not going to happen. I wish that there was a way that middle school interacts. I wish there was a way upper school groups come to the gratitude museum to visit and I think that happens but it's inconsistent. How do we create that?”

"I am a Christian and most people here are not. I would venture to say that there's a lot of misconceptions around, like, what Christians believe, and how they've been in the past, very judgmental and very bigoted and not loving. And that is not what Jesus is; Jesus, if he were here, he would be with the kids at Sandy Spring, absolutely, he would be with all of you. I wanted people to see that Jesus is real. It's my faith and it's living and active. It's not just something that, I go to church on Sunday, it's a part of my whole life. So I think that's something different for me; other people talk about the light, you know, being in the light and all that. For me the light is Jesus. It's a person. So I think my faith is something that's different."