Cheryl and Zach Ward pose for a photo with a sweet little friend in China named Marmalade.
Dear Calvary Families,
Since I have been asked many times by our community about how I ended up in my current role at Calvary, I’m sharing my story with you here in a purposed way. I’m picking up today where I left off a couple of months ago with my story about how specific experiences had transformative effects on my heart and career.
If you missed part one (with Mother Teresa), it’s posted on our school blog. Here is part two…
My post-India and pre-Calvary career was shaped by a consistent undercurrent, regardless of where I was working, that something was missing.
After my work in India, I taught in an overcrowded and impoverished school district in the Chicago area. I worked at a public school while also supplementing my income as an instructor at a local community college. I encountered mostly sincere families and students there whose life circumstances were very difficult.
I enjoyed home cooked meals from colleagues and invitations to quinceañeras. I saw families that valued hard work and displayed a good work ethic — many of the students worked in family businesses from an early age. Unfortunately, many would also have their potential quashed by early gang recruitment, drugs, violence, unstable family life, and lack of opportunity. I wondered why schools could not do better by them. I wondered: is the problem a lack of funding?
New friends from a mission compound in Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh.
Then I took a job overseas, living for one year in Beijing. Mr. Ward came over from Chicago for Christmas and proposed at my favorite haunt, the Old Summer Palace (Yuan Ming Yuan), which had wide open natural spaces (a rarity in Beijing) and pretty little bridges and walkways.
Mind you, you can find open spaces, such as Tiananmen Square, but they aren’t natural; and that specific case is purportedly teeming with undercover policemen pretending to fly kites under the watchful presence of a massive picture of the dear old Chairman.
Once, while I was strolling through a popular open market, I experienced a police takedown just at my elbow. There was no warning — I was walking along and suddenly the man beside me was swarmed, on the ground, and whisked away, disappearing completely in seconds. I wonder what he had done, where they had taken him, and what was to happen to him? Was he just a pickpocket? I’ll never know.
The first year of learning to navigate a foreign country is equally exhilarating and exhausting. You go out to eat for the first time, step into a restaurant and realize that the only food-related phrase you know so far is “chicken meat.” The server asks you, with increasing irritation, questions that you don’t understand, so you simply respond to each query with “Chicken meat. Chicken Meat. CHICKEN MEAT.”
And a few minutes later that is precisely what is delivered to your table — a hacked-up, steamed, whole chicken with no spices or flavoring. Chicken. Meat. Just as you asked.
We went home and researched restaurant-related words that evening. (I still have the original food research page somewhere in a file in storage, I think. I came across it when we moved to Michigan.)
After a family dinner of delicious and a spectacularly spicy lamb stew.
After a short hiatus to get married, we settled into a well-respected international school in a different city in China. There, we learned what it was like to work at a very well-funded school.
We found that we could have practically anything that we wanted for our departments that we led. A custom made collapsible stage to augment a 4-week public speaking unit? Done. Specialized training to develop advanced high school courses with trips to Japan, Taiwan, or back to the U.S.? Done. I recall one time when Mr. Ward wanted to develop a pottery course for the school and he learned about a gentleman in a nearby island who made his living through specialized pottery from hand-collected local clays. Zach was cleared to jet off for a few days to study clays and pottery with an obscure local master.
Obviously, a well-funded school must produce better outcomes, right? Well, it did and it didn’t.
The school community was hardworking and generally kind. Most students earned excellent grades. I was sending graduates to a wide range of places: ivy league schools (one of my graduates was accepted into about ten of the top American, British, and Korean universities: Oxford, Harvard, Stanford, Brown, Cambridge, etc.) and gap years with service opportunities in other countries. I helped twin brothers get into West Point and the U.S. Naval Academy, respectively. I’m sure our graduates can boast the normal span of “successful” lives, or not, according to personal choice and providence.
But I was still concerned about all of the essential areas that were not being addressed in my student’s lives. They were successful by some matrices, but were they thriving?
Furthermore, what did a school such as this do with students who could work with their hands, who bred fish for fun, who thrived on rock climbing and kayaking trips along the LiJiang River, who came alive when we took trips to remote villages and shared potatoes with village children? Who was developing the artists, the poets, the builders, the farmers? I found the academic track to be too narrow and rigid.
A well-funded and respected educational institution achieved certain objectives, but it also appeared to leave other important aspects of student growth unaddressed.
Once again, I questioned the whole system. Surely there was more to education than just jumping through hoops to get to the right college, to get the right job, to have enough money, to buy the right house, in the right neighborhood, so that kids could go to the right school…
Camping on a section of the Great Wall with friends.
When Zach and I returned to the U.S., we were both searching for something different. I remember we specifically said, “We don’t know any schools that are doing the kinds of things that we think schools should be doing.”
And that is how, just as China was ratcheting up for the summer olympics, and a soon-to-be global economic crisis was looming on the horizon, Zach and I found ourselves in a unique position to be introduced to an entirely new way of thinking about education…
I’ll share the rest of this story soon.
Until then,
Mrs. Cheryl Ward
Head of School
Calvary Schools of Holland