Aki Kurose

Aki Kurose, Seattle, Washington...This was copied from an interview by Studs Terkel in 1995, when Kurose was 70 (printed in his book Coming of Age). Aki Kurose died in 1998, after a 17 year struggle with cancer, and soon thereafter was honored by having a Seattle middle school named after her.


She is a Nisei, born and raised in Seattle.

As a sixteen-year-old, shortly after World War II was declared, she and her family, among scores of thousands of Japanese Americans, were arrested and sent off to internment camps.

“Horse Stalls and pigpens were converted to shelters for many of us. Our family of six was assigned to one room. They gave us burlap bags. We were told to stuff straw in them and they would be our mattresses...There were machine-gun towers in the parking lot. The guns were aimed inside, at us. People would drive around in cars, calling us names. You'd feel like an animal in the zoo.

“Everything was so surreal. The assignment one teacher in camp gave us was: 'Write why you are proud to be and American.' [Laughs softly.] We had to salute the flag every day and sing the national anthem.”


Around 1965, I was a Head Start volunteer. I got turned on to working with young people, so after my children were raised, I went back to school. I got my master's degree in early childhood education when I was fifty-six years old.

I started teaching in the early '70s and have been doing so ever since. I teach six-year olds, first grade. I've taught kindergarten and preschool, as well. I teach mathematics, science, and peace.

How does one teach peace? Well, I immediately say to them, “If you're not at peace with yourself, with your neighbor, with your community, you can't really learn very much. We have to get rid of all this garbage, this angry, competitive feeling. Then we'll all get along.”

We'd go outside and do these exercises in the morning to invigorate ourselves. We pretend that we're taking all the anger out of our bodies, getting rid of our anxieties and throwing them all into outer space. We're not polluting the space, because what we're throwing out is just being disintegrated. So we talk about environment that way also.

I tell them: When you're in school, no one is going to be sent to the principal, and nobody's going to be turned bad. If something unpleasant happens, we're going to resolve our own conflicts. When trouble may start, I tell them to stop, rest awhile, let's talk things over, because we need a cooling-off period. What happens in our classroom has to be a win-win situation for everybody. We don't have a winner and a loser.

Under no circumstances will they be punished. I tell them that making a mistake is the most natural thing to do. Everybody makes mistakes. The thing to do is to learn from our mistakes. The more mistakes you make, the more you're learning, so don't worry about that.

At my school, they didn't quite know what to do about me. The principal called me and said we were to attend a community meeting. I said, “Fine. Are the other teachers coming, too?” He said, “No. You'll be meeting with parents and you must be prepared to tell them how you're going to teach their privileged children.”

When I walked in, there were forty parents already seated. They had met an hour before, getting all their questions organized. They immediately wanted to know where I had been educated. I told them I had been to the University of Washington and was just about to get my master's degree.

They wanted to know if their children would pick up my Japanese accent. I told the, “I'm sorry, but this is a Seattle public school accent. I was born in this city.” They were so very anxious and worried. “you've been teaching poor children all these years. How will you deal with our children, who have had lots of preschool and are very advanced? Can you meet the challenge of these children?” I said I could meet the challenge of any child. “It's the challenge of the parents that may be more difficult.” They were quite shocked. [Laughs softly.] Two parents monitored my classroom every day for a month.

Here is a very affluent neighborhood of ambitious parents who don't know quite what to do with this Asian woman who is so outspoken. After a month of monitoring, they decided that I could teach. Eventually, these parents became more supportive of me than the staff did. They were the ones who recommended me for the Teacher for Excellence Award. Some of their attitudes were at first condescending, but that changed and it was wonderful.

The staff had a very hard time of it when I first came there. Remember, I had displaced a white teacher, who was transferred to the central area. They were naturally feeling sorry for the other woman and said, in so many words, that it wasn't fair that I should get all the breaks because I was of the minority. They felt it was a real privilege for me to come here to teach white children. Referring to my old school, they'd say, “Oooh, how did you stand it?” I said I loved it down there. I said, “Actually, I feel it's an inconvenience for me to come here. At the old place, I could walk to school. Now I have to drive all the way out there.”

One teacher asked me, “Who are you?”
I'm Aki Kurose”
“Well, you know what I mean.”
“No, I'm not sure, though I suspect I know what you mean.”
“What are you?”
“Oh, I'm a teacher.”
Finally, she said, “Well, where do you come from?”
“Oh. I come from Madrona.” (That's the area where I live in Seattle.)
“Well, no---you know what I mean.”
“I think I do.”
“What kind of name in Kurose?”
“That's my husband's name.”
She was getting quite angry with me. Finally, I said, “Are you asking my ethnicity?”
She said, “Yes. Are you Chinese or Japanese?”
“I am Japanese and proud of it. Why is it so important to you?”
Then she said some of her friends got killed in World War II. I said, “I'm very sorry, but I don't think I'm responsible for it. I'm against war, so please don't regard me as your enemy.” For many years, on December 7, they'd bring up Pearl Harbor: “Your people...” They'd want to talk to the students about it. I'd argue with them that that kind of history isn't what it's about. I always tell my students that war is the enemy, so you can't name people as the enemy.

It's changed a lot in the nineteen years I've been there. Because our busing is no longer mandatory, it's starting to get sterile again. We've lost a lot of black students. Oh, it was a challenge and hard at the beginning. I think the problem had more to do with money than color. You send these kids to a neighborhood with Porsches, Volvos, Mercedes, and mothers who are constantly at school to see to the needs of their own children. The whole lifestyle is so different from these bused kids, usually of single parents or working ones who can't participate. The PTAs there are like pink teas in beautiful homes. What working parent can go to a PTA meeting at ten o'clock in the morning?

The kids in my class were wonderful and starting to get along with each other. I said, “We're not going to compete.” Many of the parents in these affluent neighborhoods are so anxious for their kids to be at the top of the class. I said, “I'm sorry, in my classroom there's nobody at the top of the class, nobody in the middle, and nobody at the bottom. We work cooperatively. No grades in my class.”

At first, the parents didn't like it. They love to have their Susie first in line, top in math or top reader. I said I don't give tests that way. I give them problem-solving activities where they work cooperatively. Nobody's answer is wrong. We try to justify the answer. If they say, “Four plus three equals eight,” I say, “Let's see if we can justify that statement.” So the children work in groups of four and think about it. Each may come up with a different answer. So they rethink it. This one little boy who had four beans and three beans had to justify the total of eight. He suddenly realized something. He then broke one bean in half and said, “Four plus two plus the two halves of the seventh bean equal eight.” He thought it through.

When I first began teaching, I thought I had to have lots of knowledge that I could share with my students, so they could memorize all these things. That's not what education is about. We need to teach them that the planet earth is here for us to cherish and share with everybody. We have to stop this possessive approach, especially with young children. I realize as they grow up, they may have to compete. But at the low-elementary level, they need to build up their self-esteem and self-worth and, above all, learn to think.

I remember a letter from a college student who'd been one of my kids. “You made me interested in math and science. They have been among my favorites ever since. I know that not only does 5+6=11. So does 6+5. But the foremost part of your curriculum was peace. It has made the big difference in my life.” Teaching them the skill of living on this earth in a peaceful manner is what education should be about.

It's so sad to hear teachers saying, “I can't wait to retire. I can't wait for the school year to be over. I can't wait until three-thirty when the kids will be out of my classroom.” If you've lost that spirit, I don't think you should be teaching.

Some of them are burnt out because the classes are so large or because they can't deal with the anger of the kids. When busing started, most of the black kids were out in the hallway or being sent to the principal's office. I protested: this gives the wrong message. The other kids, the whites, se them in the hallways or in the principal's office and think they're all bad kids.

I said we don't need to punish kids this way. So I've been working with communtiy people, trying to get a peace curriculum passed through the legislature, because if you can't get along with one another, what;s the use of having a Ph.D.?

I have four kids at each of six tables. Every morning, I have a bouquet of flowers on each table so the students may enjoy its beauty---and learn the botanical names. In this way, they learn to spell rhododendron, azalea, chrysanthemum. They put a flower picture book together. On the back, they write a poem about the flowers they've come to know. In learning botany, they learn math as well---how the leaves are attached, how they are spaced, they count the petals. When the petals fall, they don't throw them away, they study them. You'll see children treasuring the stems, with the petals gone. It is not learning how to memorize, but how to see them as beautiful parts of their lives.

We grow salmon in the classroom. I take the children to the fish hatchery at the University of Washington. We see the spawning salmon. They allow us to squeeze the eggs out, which we bring back to the classroom.. We have an aquarium with refrigeration. And we grow the salmon eggs. We raise salmon! [Laughs delightedly.] Part of our curriculum is the life cycle of a salmon. The children learn a song about these fish. We release the little fingerlings back into the fresh streams, where they can hide under the rocks and gradually finish their lives, going back into the sea. Then we all sing “Bon Voyage, Bon Voyage.”

Every morning, we go outside to exercise. My bused-in-children, especially, don't need to be thrown into a classroom immediately. They need to get some of that energy out. We make a big circle, we study the clouds, the motion of the sun. While they exercise, they count by fives, by tens, “higher, higher.” All this time they're learning multiplication.

As we observe the clouds, they come up with these fantastic things: “Mrs. Kurose, you're talking about these cirrus clouds, but why do we see the cumulus?” They use these words not by rote, but because they connect with them what they experience at that moment. It's so exciting! I realize I'm learning so much from my students.

I encourge them to write constantly. They keep a journal and they write their thoughts. I don't say, “Spell it right,” certainly not at the beginning. They do inventive spelling and their stories are so exciting. I'm pretty good now at deciphering their spelling. But they know from the beginning what they've written. They share it with the group. So the observing and the writing are relevant to their day.

They know all the phases of the moon. My students tell their parents about a waxing, gibbous moon. A number of mothers and fathers there have told me, “We didn't know what a gibbous moon was until our first graders came home and told us.. We're learning astronomy from your students.”

I was honored as Teacher of the Year for the Seattle area. My name was submitted by the parents. The following year, the National Science Center gave me the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science and Mathematics. There was one winner from each state.

Bush was president. It was very ironic because under him the teachers have been damned with fewer benefits, and the students with fewer services. At the Rose Garden, some of the teachers were so excited about Bush. One said, “I'm never going to wash my hands.” I said, “Ughh!”

Bush came up to me, smiling: “Hi, would you like to take a picture with me?” I just couldn't help myself and said, “No, you're not my favorite president.” He just looked. I don't think he was even listening. I said, “You're supposed to be our 'education president,' but you don't show it. You're allotting all this money to the military, when all these children need education.” I added, “One stealth bomber would pay for the salary of hundreds of teachers. Two stealth bombers would probably supply many good school districts. You need to change your priorities.”

He just stood there with his plastic smile and he said, “Okay,” as he put his arms around me and had this person take a picture of us. He didn't hear a word I said.

I was thrilled to be in Washington. I was thrilled to see the White House. But I was sad because things just didn't fit. I had borrowed a dress from my friend because I didn't have any formal gown to wear. I put “Peace” buttons all the way across. I wear these buttons every day, on every garment. When my grandchildren come over, the first thing they say is, “Okay, you have them on.” My students love it.

During our Curriculum Night, the parents are invited. We have to explain what we teach. I said, “I want you to know that peace is the most important part of my curriculum. I teach science and math, but if a child is not at peace with himself or herself, with the neighbors, with the community, true learning cannot take place.”

On this night, one man said, “That's none of your business. I want you to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. That's why I'm sending my kid to school, to learn the three Rs. What's all this nonsense you're handing out about atomic bombs, Sadako, or whatever?” I said, “Yes, I do tell them about Sadako and the thousand cranes because I think it's a wonderful children's story.”

Sadako was a twelve-year-old girl who was an A-bomb victim and was dying of leukemia. There was a Japanese legend that if you fold a thousand paper cranes, you can have good luck and a long life. She made 650 cranes and then she died. I thought children could relate to this.

I siad to this man, “Please , take this book home and read it. It's not controversial, it's not subversive.” e took it but he wasn't very happy. I said, “If you have any problem, you can always call me at home. Or I'll stay after school. Or I can come to see you. I'm interested in the parents as well as the children. I work hard and I want you to know I will deal with any of your concerns.”

This was in September. That was the last I heard from him---until November. I got this call, “Mrs. Kurose, I'd like an appointment with you. Can I drop in after school?” I said, “Of course.” I was nervous, had no idea what he was going to say. He said, “I want to tell you a story.” I thought: Uh oh. “My son is reading so beautifully His math is wonderful, and he treats his younger brother so nicely. He's no a mean kid anymore. And he likes to talk things out. I offered him a set of G.i. Joes, but he said to me, 'Dad, Mrs. Kurose would be very upset. That's a war toy. I would rather have a microscope.'” He was delighted. He said, “Mrs. Kurose, if you have any tax problems or whatever, I'd be happy to do your taxes for free.” He was an accountant.

Another parent who came said, “Boy, were our faces red! My wife and I were yelling at each other, and our little daughter said, 'Stop, stop! You're supposed to cool off and talk things out.'” The child was in my class.

Is my teaching today better than when I was younger? Absolutely. My face gets red when I think of the first day I taught. “All right, children, let's pass out the workbook.” Ridiculous. Aside from the classes I take, the children are teaching me how to discover things. You can tell a child that mixing vinegar with baking soda is going to fizz, but it won't make an impression unless they do it themselves. We do little magic things, too. I take a boiled egg and put it on top of a bottle. It won't go in no matter how we push it. We put a match inside, burn out the carbon monoxide [sic], and pretty soon the egg plops in. I ask them why it did so. They have to think things out. How can we get it out? You try to shake it, you try to suck it, it won't come out. You blow into it and the egg pops up so dramatically. The kids go “Wow!” They see it.

Some of the teachers don't like my methods. They're very regimented and feel that my children are too free moving. One complained, “Why are you taking them outside for exercise? They get enough exercise on the bus.” I said, “I'm not only doing it for my bus children, I'm doing it for myself as well. I get inspired.”

I can understand some of these young teachers with families. It's a full-time job, so they lead a difficult double life. They spend so much time on paperwork, xeroxing, and dittoes. And these SATs are so meaningless. It's an insult to the intelligence of young people. You don't need paper and pencil. You can count beans, multiply them, grown them. All this is magic and so is learning.

I have a science club from kindergarten through the fifth grade. I have a cross-grade teaching: big kids work with little kids. They love it.

The most important thing I learned was to respect children. You hear lots of complaints about how young kids aren't respecting us anymore. Are we respecting them? Respect begets respect. Children are very perceptive. If you are not valuing them, they know it immediately.

I wonder if we don't really ruin kids in school, cause them to lose respect for themselves. I think the biggest crime is to have a kid sent down to the office. I see that all the time. I see them constantly getting expelled. Why would you expel a kid? Let's face the truth: somewhere along the line, we have failed in our teaching.

In our state, we just passed “Three Strikes and You're Out” legislation. Three crimes and you're incarcerated forever, or something. Won't we ever learn that punished children become punitive people? If you wallop them, that;s the only thing they're going to know, so the wallop others. Treat them as human beings and they'll act that way.

Edward was eight years old. His fourteen-year-old brother was shot in a playground, a gangland situation. The mother was homeless. “Can I take him home?” I asked her. She said, “It's up to you.” So I brought him home, bought him some clean clothes. I bought him three pairs of socks and three pairs of shorts. He was so proud. “Do I got to give these to my brother?” His brother was still in the hospital. I said, “No, these are for you.” He thought I'd given him gold bullion. His eyes were like big marbles. “I get to keep these?” I thought I was a do-gooder, but he did more for me than I did for him. I was impressed with his sudden pride.

I said, “Now we're going to eat.” He said, “We get to go to McDonald's?” I said, “No, we're going to buy a trout, with a head and tail and everything. You're going to cook it. We're going to practice science and have a great meal at the same time.” We brought it home. He examined it. We washed it. I let him look at the flesh, study it, salt and pepper it, put it in the oven, and watch it change. As he saw the flesh grow firmer, he shouted excitedly, It's changing!”

We put it on a platter. I said, “Okay, this is going to be your dinner. But let's de=bone it.” So we did it together, put the skeleton to the side and he examined the bones. He kept shouting, “Wow!” He got to take the skeleton to school the next day to his great delight. I put out the goblets with milk in one, juice in the other, and water in the third. At different levels, I said, “Take your spoon and hit those.” He hit the glasses and cried out, “I'm making music!”

I took him outside to look at the sky. I said, “There's Orion's belt and there's the Big Dipper and Cassiopeia.” I explained it to him. Now, he always talks about that night and his discovery of the sky.

Then I said it was time to go to bed. And when he saw the bed in a room of his own, he couldn't believe it. He had never slept in a bed by himself, let alone a room of his own. The next morning, he made his bed very carefully.

When I took him to school, during the creative writing time, he said, “I got a story.” He told it to me: “It's about stars that came down to Garfield to play football.” Garfield High is where his brother got shot. “When the stars realized they had no hands, no eyes and no legs, they went back up to the sky and made their own formations. The made Cassiopeia, the Big Dipper, and Orion.

At our school, he's been punished, suspended. This same kid. He's got the potential. He loves learning, but we're ruining him. The pity of it is the waste. Unless we stop this punitive mentality, we're going to lose a lot of kids. We've got to teach them how to deal with their anger, but we can't do it unless we learn how to deal with our own anger.

Every time he saw me, he'd say, “Peace, Mrs. Kurose.” He'd be at the playground fighting with other kids and when he saw me, he'd say, “Ooops, I forgot. Peace.” And he'd stop fighting.

After he left my class, I'd see him sitting in the principal's office. I'd say, “Send him to me. I know how to deal with him.” So many times, our minority kids would be sitting in that office all day. Its their punishment. I still have that story of his at school, all bound for him. But I'm afraid he's gone.

I'm not pessimistic. I have lots of hope. I think more people are finding out about cooperative learning. Science is exciting. Math is exciting. But it means little unless it is incorporated with peace. I feel that I need to be there to be part of making the change.