When traveling to New York City last week, I wanted to read a book with a New York setting. I chose Sonia Sotomayor's memoir, My Beloved World.
I have enjoyed this book because it is sprinkled with advice about living a meaningful life, with a major focus on two elements: relationships and education.
Sotomayor's writing style is straightforward, and her passion for living comes across vividly. She frequently writes about how much she enjoys talking to people. I imagine (and am happy to think) that she has forged close relationships with the other Supreme Court justices -- even those with whom she disagrees.
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The world that I was born into was a tiny microcosm of Hispanic New York City. A tight few blocks in the South Bronx bounded the lives of my extended family: my grandmother, matriarch of the tribe, and her second husband, Gallego, daughters and sons. My playmates were my cousins. We spoke Spanish at home, and many in my family spoke virtually no English.
My parents had both come to New York from Puerto Rico in 1944 [Sotomayor was born in 1954], my mother in the Women's Army Corps, my father with his family in search of work as part of a huge migration from the island, driven by economic hardship.Her father, who struggled with alcoholism, died when Sotomayor was only nine years old. While she struggled to come to grips with his passing, she turned to books as a source of strength.
She writes a lot about her experiences in school (she eventually attended Princeton), and I particularly enjoyed a passage about being open to learning from each and every person that enters your life:
It was then, in Mrs. Reilly's class, under the allure of those gold stars, that I did something very unusual for a child, though it seemed like common sense to me at the time. I decided to approach one of the smartest girls in the class and ask her how to study. Donna Renella looked surprised, maybe even flattered. In any case, she generously divulged her technique: how, while she was reading, she underlined important facts and took notes to condense information into smaller bits that were easier to remember; how, the night before a test, she would reread the relevant chapter. Obvious things once you've learned them, but at the time deriving them on my own would have been like trying to invent the wheel
... The critical lesson I learned is still one too many kids never figure out: don't be shy about making a teacher of any willing party who knows what he or she is doing. In retrospect, I can see how important that pattern would become for me: how readily I've sought out mentors, asking guidance from professors or colleagues, and in every friendship soaking up eagerly whatever that friend could teach me.
This passage reminds me of how much my students are learning from each other. As their teacher, one of my most important jobs is to create and nurture an environment where those interactions can thrive.
I miss President Obama's smile!
