A Family Affair: Or, Six Degrees Of Education

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bandar cemeIt was Saint Patrick’s Day, 1986. I was seventeen years old and celebrating the day with a few friends at the Knights of St. Patrick, where my paternal grandfather, a long-time New Haven city alderman, was the permittee. One of the men tending kafetaria was a New Haven cop whose daughter was dating my good friend Jack. I introduced myself as a friend of Linda’s boyfriend. Officer Mahan asked my name and of course recognized my surname when I said it. My father was the fifth of ten children. Officer Mahan asked me, “Whose son are you?” I told him I was Gary’s son, number five. His eyes widened, and Officer Mahan said, “The one who married Captain Fitchett’s daughter?” Captain Fitchett was my maternal grandfather. He was on the New Haven police force for thirty-five years, and had served as both Chief Inspector and Chief of Police at different times in his career. I said yes, and what ensued was like the scene out of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer when Tom, Huck, and Joe Harper appear in church after everyone in town believed they had drowned. I was like the long lost Dauphin returned to claim the throne. Both families used to be like lesser royalty in New Haven, and I was the only son born to both lines. Among all the Irish cops, I was a prince.

My family had lots of cops within my grandparents’ and parents’ generations. Besides my grandfather there were also my uncles Billy, Mike, Ric, and Wayne. But for all those cops, we were (and are) mostly a family of teachers. My mother, father, and step-father were teachers, and so were my aunts Winifred and Betse, and my uncles Red, John, and Joe. Within my generation, in addition to my wife and myself, my cousin Brian and his wife Jackie, and my cousins Jennifer, Nikki, Stephanie, Karyn, and Kevin are all teachers. My brother Steve is a PhD candidate in Math who teaches Introductory Calculus here at UConn, and my cousin Gabby is a UConn freshman who hopes to become a high school math teacher. More than likely, I’m also forgetting someone.

So there are days when I feel as if I belong to teaching royalty, or as if I am playing a game of Six Degrees of Education. I used to joke that if you were from New Haven, someone in my family had either instructed you or incarcerated you. Now, as I work with more and more teachers each year, I know that if I ask enough questions, sooner or later I will find a connection to one of the teachers in my family.

Earlier in the semester I discovered that my cousin Gabby was taking the same Calc class my brother was teaching, though a different section. Steve and Gabby are not related to each other, and before this semester didn’t know one another, but now Steve tutors Gabby. She gets some free help and he gets some practice being a teacher. And just a week or so ago I discovered that a student in my Advanced Composition class had been a student of my cousin Jennifer’s at Lyman Hall in Wallingford. He even traveled with her to New Orleans on a field trip.

But that’s not as surprising as an incident that happened several years ago. I had a student named Lauren who mentioned in her literacy narrative that she had attended elementary school in Hamden. I asked her to name her first grade teacher, and she said, “Mrs. Zito.” That’s my mother. I asked Lauren to let me borrow her cell phone, and without explaining what I was doing, I called my mother. As soon as she answered, I handed the phone to Lauren and said, “Say hi to Mrs. Zito.”

Even today, I learned from my son’s third grade teacher that one of my advisees and current students is doing her clinical placement in her class. The three of them only just figured out today the relationships among us, and then it was like a race among the three of them to see who could tell me first. (The teacher won).

With such a large family and so many teachers, I should get used to this sort of thing, but it continues to fascinate me. Like the time last semester when my colleague was singing the praises of one of her students, and when she named the student I just smiled and said, “Oh, that’s my cousin.”