Past Lives of CGS Teachers

By Maddie Snyder 26’

Photos of CGS Teacher in High School, Upper left Bianca Nakayuma, Upper Right Sue Phillps, Bottom Cristy Vo

Believe it or not, our very own Catlin Gabel School (CGS) teachers were once the ones on the receiving end of lectures and approaching essay deadlines. Although those, and other aspects of high school can be daunting, we can learn more than just calculus equations from our teachers. 

“I was a lot like I am now. Kind of quiet, nerdy, like[d] math,” said Upper School Math Teacher Mark Amasuga about himself in high school. Amasuga actually started his teaching journey in high school as a part of a Calculus peer-tutoring program. “It’s probably because of that that I'm teaching now,” he remarked. 

Amasuga has been somewhat of a math prodigy throughout his life. In fact, he skipped second grade, which, due to his small stature, caused him problems when he got to high school.

“When I was a freshman in high school, everybody thought I was some other student's, like younger brother or something,” said Amasuga. Many often thought he was a student at the middle school across the street. He was often asked if he was lost or in the right place. 

“Yeah, I'm in the right place. I'm just short,” he would reply.

Librarian Sue Phillips was looking to pursue a career in science in high school and faced a similar awkward experience because of it. After her ninth-grade chemistry class, she ended up in most students’ worst nightmare: walking around school without pants on. 

In one of her science classes, a mishandling of the bunsen burner led to an overflow of chloric acid into Phillips’ pants. “I ran to the front of the room and used that shower,” recalled Phillps. “I got totally soaked.” 

Although Phillips’s skin was unharmed, the acid burned through her jeans throughout the day, causing a massive patch to go missing from her side. “They started to peel off in strips. So my pants were falling off,” she remarked, chuckling. Phillips’s mom had to drive to school to give her a new pair of pants.

It wasn’t a student's nightmare come to life that made her rethink her career though, as Phillips said that change came later down the line in college. A similar change, but inverse subject switch to science teacher Bianca Nakayama, who was a much more humanities-focused student in high school. “Actually some of my least favorite classes were my science classes,” said Nakayama. 

But Nakayama’s favored academic field is not the only thing that has changed about her since she was in high school, as she described her sixteen-year-old self as “so self-righteous”. 

“I was vegetarian and I would judge you so hard if you weren't vegetarian,” she said. Nakayma’s brother had a job at Nike while she was in high school, a company that had a reputation for using child labor, which left her in disbelief of her brother’s moral code. 

She remembered one day, her brother left for work and then came back into the house saying he had forgotten something. Nakayama had called back “Was it your conscience?”, which her brother did not appreciate. “Like that was me in high school. I was so annoying,” Nakyama reflected while laughing. 

Nakayama stated that a piece that led to her “self-righteousness” was the fact she was a very good student. She took classes at the high school as a middle schooler, and courses at a local college once she had “maxed out” the high school curriculum. By the time she was a junior, half her classes were taken in college, but never included a course in the science field. 

In fact she said that until her second year of colleg, she believed she would major in linguistics, particularly German. 

Similar to Nakayama, Upper School English teacher Cristy Vo, also heavily favored the humanities in high school, although Vo carried that preference into her teaching career. On top of being an avid book reader, Vo also played the flute in her school’s marching band. She stated that because she grew up in Texas “the marching band was a big part of our football team, so that really was a big part of my identity then.” 

When describing her friend group Vo said “we read a lot, we talked about music, and we had some theater friends, so you kind of get the gist of like, the cut of friends.” She also added, “I was not a popular person by any means.” 

Vo went to a high school with around 650 people per grade. For scale, CGS has 785 students across all grades K-12. “You were very much like a number,” Vo recalled, stating that it was pretty much impossible to know every single person. 

Nakyama’s high school environment mirrored Vo’s. “Sports just ruled the world and everyone wore their letter jacket and it was a really big deal if you like got your varsity letter in football or basketball or whatever,” said Nakayama.“And I lettered in math.” She said that she never put it on a jacket though. 

On top of being the math team captain Nakayama was a serious ballerina, and also a massive fan of 90s metal rock. “My favorite [band] in high school was probably Soul Coughing,” stated Nakayama. Her friend group centered around their shared love of the band. 

So much so that in fact they got their school’s Homecoming DJ to play a song called Bus to Beelzebub. “They were just playing like normal, like R&B top 40 songs, right? And we're like, ‘we're going to request Soul Coughing.’” recalled Nakayama. Unknowing to the song’s sound, the DJ played the tune and according to Nakayama, the whole gym went silent. 

“The cafeteria went from everyone like dancing, having a great time to just like record scratch, like dead silence.” She described. While everyone was asking “What is this?” Nakayama and her friends were jamming out to the music. “Everyone's just staring at us, like, who are these freaks?” she recalled. 

Although the song was only on for about thirty seconds, according to Nakayama the entire Gym cheered when the DJ turned it off. Different from Nakayama's small, tight-knit, and punk-rock-loving friend group, Phillips described herself as overall, a “crossover person” in high school. 

“I knew a lot of different people,” she said. Phillips played sports, so she had friends from that community, but she was also friends with some of the more “geeky kids”. Phillips remarked that it was “actually a really fun way to be”, as she often got invited to more things because of it. 

Although Phillips described herself as an academic student, she also admitted that she didn’t try that hard in high school. “My homework load, and the amount of time I would have spent on homework was a lot less than Catlin kids,” said Phillips.

Amasuga had a similar academic experience, as misunderstandings about his age were not the only problems he faced due to his mathematical intelligence.

“It was just like really easy,” stated Amasuga about high school, at least in his math classes. He said that due to the fact he could succeed without having to study, he never learned those skills. Since he didn’t develop these skills in high school, he really suffered during the first couple of semesters of college. 

“Just having brain power and talent is not enough… You gotta work,” said Amasuga. “I hope you use my story as a cautionary tale.” He said that although life did work out for him, and he very much enjoys being a CGS teacher, but he still ponders what could have been,“who knows, maybe I could have been Jeff Bezos or something.”

Amasuga said that due to his experience, the students he worries about more are the ones who get As easily, than those who work hard and get an A- or B. “When I look at my students and try to figure out who's gonna be doing well in college or not, it's not just the kids that are getting As. It's the kids that really have their priority straight and try really hard,” said Amasuga.  

But there is obviously a balance as Nakayama and Vo both stated that they worry about the kids that are overly stressed about grades and college. Vo wishes she could have told her high school self that there would be more tests and to just enjoy being a teenager. "I was thinking too much about my future even though I was 17," said Vo.

In more than one way Nakayama wished she could have told herself to “Chill out.” She elaborated by saying, “You don’t need to prove things to people. You're not better than anyone else. You're not smarter than anyone else.” 

Even after high school Nakayama still keeps in touch with the friends she made, who she said she is closer to than her college friends. In fact she keeps a Snapstreak with her best friend from high school, which at the time of this interview was at 23,354 days. “We talk every day,” she said about her friend, who now lives in San Francisco “and we literally still use inside jokes on a regular basis from the 90s.” 

Different from Nakayama, Phillips says that after she moved to Portland from Boston in 1993, she didn’t really look back. “It was a fun, perfectly positive chapter but I don’t really keep up with people from high school,” said Phillips. 

She did say that if she were to give students on CGS a piece of advice from her experience, it would be to not “be super sure about what your career is going to be.” Phillips said that people are often very influenced by parents or other older figures. As she didn’t decide to even major in literature until college, she encourages students to keep their options open. 

Phillips also said that outside of academics, she encourages people to befriend people who are very different from themselves. “Everybody's got a story and everybody has something very interesting and quirky about themselves,” she stated. 

She said that not trying to know people means missing out on a wealth of information. “Don’t be boring and just have friends in one group or all from one kind of life,” she urged. 

Amasuga stated his perspective on high school has shifted since leaving and now teaching at one. When he was in high school he believed, as he suspects we do now, that teachers have everything figured out. 

He says that now he is a teacher he knows that they didn’t always know everything. “We're learning just as much as you guys are, you know?” said Amasuga. 

Nakayama finished by saying that because her first two years of high school were rough and she struggled to find friends at points, she gained an escapist view of high school. “I think I got a little too focused on trying to escape and then also a little too focused on what was coming next, and I wish I had just enjoyed the high school experience a little bit more,” she recalled. 

So whether you're in a band, a vertically challenged math wiz, jamming out to grunge rock, or walking around school with your pants falling off, high school can feel daunting and at some points can feel all-consuming. There are a million factors like stressful workloads, tricky social situations, and impending college applications tunneling our vision. 

Sometimes it’s important to remember that those embarrassing moments become stories to laugh about, and for better or for worse, depending on how you see it we won’t be here forever. So it might do everyone a little good, to breathe, talk to someone you don’t know, try something new, and in Nakayama’s words “chill out”.