Mrs. Karalee Wong Nakatsuka, an 8th grade U.S. history teacher at First Avenue Middle School and California’s 2019 History Teacher of the Year, has been recognized for her efforts in teaching by being featured in TIME Magazine’s “From Teachers To Custodians, Meet the Educators Who Saved A Pandemic School Year.” She has been given an honored spot in a TIME Magazine article, following the changes made to the curriculum during the 2020-2021 school year during a period of continuing Asian American hate crimes.

Mrs. Nakatsuka had been planning to fulfill the standard curriculum as well as she could within the limitations of teaching through a pandemic. Things seemed to go as usual, and her class was getting through the instruction fairly well, with online classes running as smoothly as possible. The fact that 2020 was a presidential election year also added more focus on voting, as the lessons began to shift more towards current events..

Then, on Mar. 16, disaster struck. From former President Trump coining the terms “Kung Flu” and the “China Virus,” and multiple hate crimes throughout the nation, America was divided. Amidst all of this, a gunman burst into three spas in the Atlanta metropolitan area, killing eight people in the process. Out of these murdered, six were women of Asian descent. It was at this moment that Mrs. Nakatsuka knew she had to do something.

As the Arcadia Unified School District student body is about “70% Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI),” Mrs. Nakatsuka decided to pivot and begin her 4th quarter curriculum by beginning with Anti-Asian American hate. During the past, things would usually start with Ellis Island, then moving onto Angel Island, with this year being flipped. In the rise of anti-Asian hate, she was earnest in talking about the history of anti-Asian American hate throughout the country, including the Chinese Exclusion Act, immigration through Angel Island (using the example of her grandfather going through the immigration station), and the history of anti-Asian discrimination in America. Mrs. Nakatsuka commented on how history is normally taught.

“People talk about the good old days, but good for whom? There’s a lot of romanticization of our history, going back to the way it was always taught,” she explained, talking about how she first learned history. “History was always taught with a very narrow perspective, it wasn’t really diverse, and the way it was taught didn’t include the ‘people’ in ‘We the People.’”

Through sharing about her Chinese heritage and history, along with booking a virtual tour of Angel Island to safely see the prison-like immigration station, Mrs. Nakatsuka was able to highlight a part of history not normally seen. Since the pandemic led to a loss of teaching time, she had to do as much as she could.

“I wasn’t able to cover all of what I wanted to cover in as in depth as I wanted to, but there are things that I was happy with,” she mentioned while discussing her visions for what to cover that school year. “I started this pandemic year of teaching knowing that it was important for me to not only teach the students about slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, but that it was vital to connect the past to the present and to talk about George Floyd and Black Lives Matters so that students would have context to understand this present moment. And when Atlanta happened, I said, ‘We cannot start our study of immigration with Ellis Island this year, we need to talk about the history of anti-Asian American hate in our country, including Chinese Exclusion and the Angel Island immigration experience, and we need to connect it to the current anti-Asian hate we see and what happened at Atlanta.’”

After successfully teaching about Asian American immigration and their history of discrimination in the U.S., Mrs. Nakatsuka was glad that her students were able to really connect with the topic at hand. Following this, she was able to teach about Ellis Island, letting her students compare the two major immigration stations.

With this in mind, she was honored with a spot in TIME Magazine’s new article, highlighting the ways educators stepped up for students during the pandemic. Here, she was awarded for her efforts and focused on what it means to be an American citizen, showing that all parts of U.S. history need to be represented.

Photo courtesy of Karalee Wong Nakatsuka