Author Archives: Terry Lee Marzell

About Terry Lee Marzell

Terry Lee Marzell holds a bachelor's degree in English from Cal State Fullerton and a master's degree in Interdisciplinary Studies from Cal State San Bernardino. She also holds a certificate for Interior Design Level 1 from Mt. San Antonio College. She has been an educator in the Corona Norco Unified School District for more than 30 years.

Remembering educator and Civil Rights leader Bob Moses

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Math educator and legendary Civil Rights Movement leader Bob Moses organized Black voter registration efforts and the Freedom Schools made famous during the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer. Photo credit: The Pine Belt News

During Black History Month, we’d like to recognize Bob Moses. He was a legendary Civil Rights Movement leader who organized black voter registration efforts and Freedom Schools made famous during the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer. He was also an innovative math educator.

Bob Moses was born in New York City on Jan. 23, 1935, to a family of modest means. He was raised in the Projects in Harlem. Despite his family’s limited financial resources, Bob earned a scholarship to attend Stuyvesant High School, an elite public high school for gifted boys. Before his graduation in 1952, Bob was elected senior class president and served as the captain of the school’s baseball team.

Upon graduation, Bob earned another scholarship, this time to attend Hamilton College, a prestigious private liberal arts college in Clinton, New York. There he majored in philosophy and participated in both the basketball and baseball programs. After completing the requirements for his Bachelor’s degree in 1956, Bob traveled abroad extensively, working in a series of Quaker summer camps in Europe and Japan building housing for the poor, harvesting crops for a missionary hospital, and improving facilities for mentally disturbed children. The following year he earned his Master’s degree in Analytic Philosophy from Harvard University.

Bob was teaching at the prestigious Horace Mann High School in the Bronx when he became aware of the student sit-ins that were taking place in Greensboro, North Carolina. He decided to join them, and that decision launched the math educator’s path towards becoming a legendary figure during the 1960’s Civil Rights Movement. Bob is best known for organizing the Black voter registration efforts and the Freedom Schools made famous during the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer. This heroic teacher’s revolutionary work, which was not without risk to life and limb, transformed the political power structure of entire communities.

Forty years later, Bob advocated for yet another transformational change: the Algebra Project. When he created this program, Bob asserted that a deficiency in math literacy in poor neighborhoods puts impoverished children at an economic disadvantage. The deficiency makes students unable to compete successfully for jobs in the 21st century. This disenfranchisement, he declared, is as debilitating as lack of personal liberties was prior to the Civil Rights Movement. Bob’s solution was to organize people, community by community, school by school, to overcome the achievement gap. He believed this would give impoverished children the tools they need to claim their share of economic enfranchisement. Bob described his work in this area in his  book, Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project written with fellow Civil Rights worker Charles E. Cobb, Jr.

Sadly, Bob Moses passed away in Florida on Sun., July 25, 2021, at the age of 86.

A chapter about this remarkable teacher is also included in my second book, entitled Chalkboard Heroes: Twelve Courageous Teachers and Their Deeds of Valor.  This book is also available on amazon; click on this link to view: Chalkboard Heroes.

Kelley Cusmano named Michigan’s 2025 Teacher of the Year

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High school English teacher Kelley Cusmano has been named the Michigan State 2025 Teacher of the Year. Photo credit: Bridge Michigan

There are many exemplary teachers work in America’s public schools. One of these is Kelley Cusmano, a high school English teacher from Michigan. She has been named her state’s 2025 Teacher of the Year.

Kelley teaches at Rochester High School in Rochester, Michigan. She teaches Language Arts courses to sophomores and in Elements of Composition to juniors who read below grade level in a diverse student body. She also provides instruction in Student Leadership on her campus. In a career as an educator that has spanned 20 years, she has spent nearly 17 of them at Rochester.

Since 2022, she has also served as the Secondary English Language Arts Curriculum Consultant for Rochester Community Schools. She was selected a of Klawe Fellow for 2020-2021. In addition, in 2018 Kelley served as a member of a committee of educators who organized the Governor’s Education and Talent Summit. And currently, she serves as an at-large representative for the Michigan ASCD organization and serves on the CEO Teacher Cabinet for the Teach Plus organization. Her selection as her state’s Teacher of the Year is not the only recognition Kelley has earned. In March, 2017, she was named Adviser of the Year by the Michigan Association of Student Councils. In 2016, she was selected Emerging Leader by the Association for Curriculum Development.

It is not a surprise that Kelley chose a career in education. “From a young age, I knew that I wanted to work with kids,” she remembers. “I was inspired by spending a lot of time in my mom’s classroom—she taught kindergarten in Concord, Michigan—and my identical twin sister and I would spend hours reading books to kids, playing on the playground with them, etc.,” she continues. “However, as I got older, I actually became interested in writing/journalism as a career, so I entered Michigan State University as a journalism major. I knew I still wanted to work with kids, so I blended both of my loves and decided to become a high school English teacher,” she concludes.

Kelley earned her Bachelor’s degree in English with a Minor in History from Michigan State University in 2005. In 2009, she earned her Master’s degree in Curriculum and Instruction, also from Michigan State.

 

Elementary school teacher and traveling trailblazer Fanny Ruth Blum

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Elementary school teacher Fanny Blum was a traveling trailblazer in her day. Photo credit:San Bernardino Sun

There are many exceptional educators who serve as trailblazers and role models. One of these is Fanny Ruth Blum, an elementary school teacher who traveled the world as a single woman in a time period where this was not typically done.

Fanny was born on May 17, 1935, in the small town of East Lynn in West Virginia, the fourth of seven siblings. As a young child, she was a dedicated student. In high school, she studied journalism and served on the committee that produced the campus yearbook. As a young woman, she earned her Bachelor’s degree in Journalism from Marshall University located in Huntington, West Virginia. She also completed the requirements for her teaching credential there.

Fanny was excited by the prospect of travel, and was certainly a pioneer in her day. As soon as she completed her education, she accepted teaching positions first in the Philippines and then in Germany. As a single woman in her 20’s, she travelled throughout Asia and Europe, where she celebrated the New Year at the Shangri-La in Singapore. She once went skiing with actor rock Hudson and she also once shook hands with John F. Kennedy.

After returning to the United States, Fanny taught in a small mining town in Northern California. There she met and married Caroll Arthur Blum, an engineer. The couple relocated to Salt Lake City, Sacramento, and Stockton. It was while in Stockton that Fanny and Carol expanded their family to include three children. In the 1980s, Carol was offered a professional opportunity to travel to Saudi Arabia, and the Blums readily agreed. During these years, the family enjoyed tours of Europe and Africa.

After Carol passed away in 1983, Fanny returned to California with her children, settling in Placencia and accepting a position as a kindergarten teacher. Once she retired, she moved to Murrieta, California, where she lived until her passing on January 20, 2025, at the age of 89.

 

Iowa’s Grace Allen Jones: She worked to educate to Black youth

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Iowa’s Grace Allen Jones championed greater educational opportunities for Black students in her home state, Missouri, and Mississippi. Photo credit: Public Domain.

During Black History Month, we shine a spotlight on numerous African American educators. Today, we spotlight Grace Allen Jones, a teacher from Iowa who worked tirelessly to provide educational opportunities for African American youth in her home state, in Missouri, and in Mississippi.

Grace was born on January 7, 1876, in Keokuk, Iowa. Unlike many African Americans of her day, her parents were educated and financially well-off. As a young girl, Grace attended Burlington High School in Burlington, Iowa. There she earned her diploma in 1891. Following high school, she attended Burlington Normal School from 1894 to 1895.

After she earned her college degree, Grace spent three years in Missouri teaching at schools in Bethel and Slater. In 1902, she returned to Iowa and founded a vocational school for African American students. She named the school the Grace M. Allen Industrial School for Colored Youth.

When the school closed in 1906, Grace enrolled in public speaking courses a the Chicago Conservatory of Music. Once she completed her courses in Chicago, Grace worked as a fundraiser and public speaker, advocating for better educational opportunities for all the students in her community.

After her marriage to fellow-educator Laurence Jones, Grace accepted a teaching position at Piney Woods Country Life School in Rankin County, Mississippi. At this school, students were offered courses in agriculture, carpentry, dairy farming, and construction. To help support the school, Grace organized and led several student choir groups on fundraising tours across the South, the Midwest, and the East. The schools’ Five Blind Boys of Mississippi, the Cotton Blossom Singers, and the International Sweethearts of Rhythm were just three of several choral groups that Grace organized.

In addition to her classroom and fundraising responsibilities, Grace actively participated in clubs meant to advance the status of women and, more specifically, women of color. Those groups also worked to improve child care, to teach African American history, to start libraries for African American children, and to provide resources so that physically handicapped African American children could learn. In addition, she helped start an American Red Cross organization for African Americans, and she served as President of the Mississippi State Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs from 1920 to 1924. Later she served as a statistician for the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs in 1925.

Sadly, this Chalkboard Champion passed away of complications from pneumonia on March 2, 1928, in Piney Woods. She was only 52 years old. To read more about Grace Allen Jones, see this article published about her by Piney Woods School.