My Story 
Yasin, Jon (2009-03-28)
>>INTERVIEWER:
>>JON YASIN: I am going to start talking?
>>INTERVIEWER: Yes.
>>JON YASIN: Okay, hi. My name is Jon Yasin. I am staff at Bergen Community College in Paramus, New Jersey. I was born in Birmingham, South Carolina in Richmond's colored hospital. So it was in the era of segregation. I went to elementary school for about the first four years of my life. There was no kindergarten and I never had babysitters outside of the family; it was all extended family. 
>>JON YASIN: One of the things I most remember about literacy was that my sister, who was four years older than I am, used to play school with my cousins. So she started teaching us about reading. I went to school at six years old; it was South Broad Elementary School. We now call it FEJ McCall*. As I said earlier it was segregated so it was automatically black children. There are two things that I remember about that experience. Number one, I remember all of the teachers because they were very caring, loving people and from the very beginning they told us that one of the things that we had to do was prepare ourselves to go to college. Because we had to help the African Americans; we defined ourselves as Negroes at that time and we thought ourselves a community. 
>>JON YASIN: But they were very, very serious and they were very, very dedicated. I remember I skipped one semester and then I skipped a second semester. By the fifth grade, my parents had moved us to San Francisco because my mother said they were literally tired of the Ku Klux Klan parades through our community. Then when we got to San Francisco was when I really began to appreciate what those teachers had done for us. Because we had school in the Richmond district, which people in San Francisco would know that is going towards the beach, towards the Pacific Ocean. 
>>JON YASIN: It was a standard middle class community and we were trapped. My sister and I both ended up on the highest levels of those tracks. That is when I began to realize that those teachers in that poor school had really prepared us, enabled the process for preparing us for what they wanted us to do. And that was for all of us to go to college because they wanted us to help the society, generally, not us specifically. That is an experience that I often reflected on in middle school, which was junior high school at that time, and also at college. I mean high school as well as college, because I was never particularly interested in going to college but people in my community -- Willie Brown who was the ex-Mayor of San Francisco and also the Speaker of the Assembly of the State of California was one of the youth leaders in my church. Willie was always: "You had to go to college and you've got to do it because you've got to help yourself and the community." Of course, as a minister of our church -- I am Muslim now but this is before I became a Muslim -- the minister at our church, Dr. Boswell, and Judge Kennedy and Leroy [unintelligible] on the prosecuting; all those people. Additionally, my family. They were very supportive of us in terms of developing those reading and writing skills and what we had to do for success. 
>>JON YASIN: I attribute all of that to my family, first of all my mother, and also the rest of them. Because, as I said, I was never particularly interested, even I was not very interested in going to high school but they forced me to go. Of course, that started with the counselor in my junior high school because I told her I wanted to go to one of the schools that was not one of the academic schools. The name of the school is Polytechnic and she said "Oh you shouldn't go there." And I said to her "But you told me I had a choice of going to whichever school I would like." She said "Oh, no. I say to everyone generally, but you should go to either Lowell, Abraham Lincoln, or George Washington." Those were the academic schools. Lowell is the oldest. I had a lot of friends who were there because most of the young people in my community where we lived were Jewish kids and most of them went there. Abraham Lincoln -- well I wanted to go to Poly because Poly was 50% African American and Latino, but it was not one of the academic schools. So she was intent on me going to college, as was the rest of my family. Abraham Lincoln had seven African Americans. We called them the Mighty Seven; they were all friends of mine. Out of 3,000. It was also a little far because it was in the Sun Set District. So I wasn't particularly interested in going there. >>JON YASIN: I ended up going to George Washington after this counselor called my mom. Of course, my dad had died at this time and my mother was -- she is retired now -- but she was a registered nurse. When she came to school to talk about that and when I saw her in her nurses uniform, I knew I had lost the battle. Because ordinarily she would have gone home, taken a bath and got dressed up and come in very formal. As many African Americans mothers did because that generation was very concerned about that. But when I saw her in her nurse's uniform I knew I had lost that battle and I submitted. I went off to George Washington, then to the State University and then to Peace Corps. Then I came home and went to the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and Colombia University for my doctorate. That was the path that I took for literacy. 
>>JON YASIN: In terms of teaching, when I came home from the Peace Corps, I had a friend -- I was going to study anthropology -- but I had a friend, an adult male, who asked me to teach him to read and I could not do it. He said to me "But you have been to college." And I said to him "Well, what does that have to do with the price of tea in China?" And he said "Well, you are supposed to be able to do everything." I realized that people who have no experience in an academy thought that after four years you could practice law, you could practice medicine, you could teach, you could do whatever. But that really piqued an interest because I was interested in language anyway, having learned French and also Wolof, an African language, in the Peace Corps. So I got interested in teaching and I asked him at one point "Well, why was he so interested in having me teaching him to read?" Because he had gone through school in Washington, D.C. And he said to me that his daughter, who was now in the fifth grade, came home and asked him to help her with her homework and he couldn't do it. 
>>JON YASIN: So those are the two stories that I have, all of that opportunity. I never thought about how I was going to organize it until I met this man. That was this whole notion of literacy became more meaningful to me than it had previously. Is that okay? 
>>INTERVIEWER: Mmhmm. 
>>JON YASIN: Okay, so we teach reading and writing and linguistics now.         
>>INTERVIEWER: Excellent, thank you so much!
>>JON YASIN: Okay. 
>>INTERVIEWER: You are done except for one thing.
>>JON YASIN: How long was that? Do you know?
>>INTERVIEWER: It is about seven -- you talked for seven minutes. 
>>JON YASIN: Oh, okay. 
>>INTERVIEWER: What I am going to do is I -