Teaching, Not Just for the Future
It was February 2025: the doldrums of the school year. I had just sat through a 3-hour professional development about de-escalation, and in one hour I would be attending my school’s Local School Council (LSC) meeting, where elected representatives would be reviewing résumés to select a new principal for my school.
I was laying on my yoga mat in Hyde Park—a Southside neighborhood of Chicago—fitting a small bit of self-care into my day. I hadn’t been in that yoga studio in nearly four years and even then, I was never a regular. As we neared the end of the session, I stared up at the square ceiling tiles, appreciating the rare pause in my day. The last time I laid here, I had just lost a close friend, college roommate, and fellow educator, Laura, in a tragic train crash in my family’s home country of Taiwan—a place she was not from, but where she chose to teach.
The phrase “like a train wreck” is often thrown about casually to describe outcomes ranging from less than favorable to disastrous. On the evening of April 1, 2021, I checked my phone and saw a notification from The New York Times about a high-speed train crash in Taiwan—where my ancestors are from and where I travel every few years to revisit my roots. The notification caught my attention as there were dozens of fatalities, but after skimming the article and seeing that it took place in a city nowhere near where my relatives live, I went to bed with some sadness, but primarily relief.
Two days later, I received a call that changed my life. My roommate Genna and I had just returned from a bike ride and were sprawled out on our couches watching college basketball. My best friend Tiffany video-called us and, with barely any ability to get her words out, asked if we had heard about the crash. “Yes, but…why?” I responded. Then she said, “Laura was on that train.”
Genna and I paused, praying and hoping for a “but she’s okay” or “she’s in critical condition”, but none came. Instead, Tiffany only started to break down. The three of us cried in silence as we began the long, arduous journey of grieving our college roommate and dear friend.
She was seeking the joy that originally brought her to teaching and I’m convinced, despite having taught there for only a few months, she found it in Taiwan.
Laura passed away in the deadliest train accident in Taiwan’s history. It was a nonsensical accident due to negligence and systemic failures, taking the lives of 49 people. Laura was there on a gap-year Fulbright scholarship to teach English as she transitioned between school districts—an effort to combat teacher burnout after 2.5 years in the classroom, including during the pandemic. She was seeking the joy that originally brought her to teaching and I’m convinced, despite having taught there for only a few months, she found it in Taiwan.
In the yoga studio that afternoon, the rawness of my grief came back to me in a wave. I had forgotten how the overwhelm could crash over my insides, freezing me into a fixation on her death. I want so badly to remember Laura’s life and how she implored me to be the best teacher possible and, even more so, to take care of my soul in my first few years of teaching.
In many ways, I feel like I have failed her in the latter, and yet I also know she was guilty of doing the same—she cared so much about her students.
Teachers often have role models in our minds, influencing the way we teach and our professional persona. It is one of the gifts about our jobs; we have all been students, so we have an impression of what teachers are like. We look up to teachers we’ve had, observed, and been mentored by. For many of us, these mentors become lifelong professional and personal relationships that influence students for many generations. My teacher role model and dear friend was Laura Luo. One identity she carried with absolute seriousness and dignity was an elementary school educator. Though her career was brief, it was impactful because of how many lives she touched—both in the classroom and in her friend networks. Just recently, I surpassed her nearly three-year career serving in public education. It was surreal. I looked up to Laura as an educator since she began teaching in 2018, but she now had a career that was frozen at just 2.5 years.
Laura was a trailblazer in our tight-knit Asian American friend group, choosing to pursue teaching instead of a lucrative career that was expected of her. In an email to me from July 2017, Laura wrote about her graduate courses at the Stanford Teacher Education Program, spewing off a series of questions that influenced those around her, including me: “How do we change math instruction so it’s not just drill and it’s something that can become meaningful and collaborative? How do we make our classroom libraries equitable? How do we address cultural and racial differences in the classroom when we manage behavior?” (L. Luo, personal communication, July 26, 2017). In January 2019, as I was pursuing a career change to teaching, Laura reviewed my graduate school application essays, unafraid to critique aspects of my savior mentality or deficit-minded orientation about students. She was also encouraging, insisting that when my first year of teaching finally came around, she would send me self-care packages. Unfortunately, that never happened.
About a year after Laura’s death, during my first year of teaching, one of my freshmen students, Brianna1, was shot and killed in front of her siblings during an attempted robbery. She was just 15. It was nonsensical. It was a murder that appeared to be a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, destined to be forgotten in the long list of shootings in Chicago’s Southside. But Brianna was memorable: her insistence on speeding up my lessons the moment that she understood the content, her eagerness to rush to the door if there was an incident in the hallway, and her need for reassurance whenever she and I butted heads (“We good, Ms. Shyu?”).
I’m challenging myself to dwell less in a future-orientation for my students—not so my students can grow up and be successful in the future, but because their experience now is perhaps just as valuable.
In the zombie-like mindset that is first-year teaching, my priority was not always teaching the skills of collaboration or reflecting on my students’ social-emotional learning. When Brianna died, my fourth period spent two days chatting, going through boxes of Kleenex, and writing her mother messages in handmade cards. I was forced to confront the why of my profession in a community where my students’ lives could be taken at any moment. I began to wonder if the content that I teach (Algebra I) matters less than the manner in which my students learn and how they feel in my classroom. What was the value in pushing knowledge into my students without thinking about the activities that promote student talk, conflict resolution, and creativity? Could my focus on results over the learning process be dehumanizing?
Contemplating someone’s legacy is a funny thing. Is it authored by the person who has passed or by loved ones left behind—to honor our dead or to comfort the living? While Laura’s legacy seemed more robust simply because she was 27 and had embarked on a career, Brianna’s friends had a lot to teach me about her 15 year life. For the next year or so, we could not walk around the school without seeing “#LongLiveBrianna” and “#Forever15” written in Sharpie on a bathroom stall or hallway. It was a constant reminder of the way my students will not forget Brianna and, though not their intention, a reminder for how I design my lessons and build classroom culture.
In many ways, Brianna pointed me to Laura. I had forgotten all the advice Laura had given me. While we are passionate and inquisitive about teaching, it is crucial to prioritize students’ and teachers’ experiences above results. As an early-career teacher, I defaulted to checking off weekly tasks: grading, creating handouts, writing assessments, and communicating with families. Brianna and Laura, both through the nature of their deaths and the people they were, remind me that the in-the-moment experiences of students and teachers matter much more.
At the end of Laura’s email to me back in 2017, she wrote about her graduate classes: “There are so many questions to explore and so many more questions I have after every class that the 3 hours goes by pretty quickly. I’m loving the feeling of being engaged in school and the feeling of learning for my future” (L. Luo, personal communication, July 26, 2017). Laura’s future was cut short, but reflecting on her and Brianna’s lives led me to a conclusion: we teach not for the future, but for the present feeling we provide to our students and ourselves. I’m challenging myself to dwell less in a future-orientation for my students, and instead to cultivate a classroom experience that grows their confidence, sense of belonging, and love for learning—not so my students can grow up and be successful in the future, but because their experience now is perhaps just as valuable.
This is my third year of teaching. People always ask me how this year is going and my response is typically something like, “The vibes are good in my classroom, but outside of my classroom, it has been so political.” I’m so proud of the culture I’ve created in my room and the accountability students have for each other and their own education. However, I’ve been jolted by efforts in our Local School Council to place administration in power without embracing democratic ideals or prioritizing listening to teacher experiences.
At the end of the yoga session, I hopped on my bike and rode back to school. I went upstairs and, sweaty yoga outfit and all, sat down in the LSC Meeting. What happened next felt, to me, ill-serving of our students. After reviewing potential principal résumés for 75 minutes, the LSC voted to award the contract to our interim acting principal, forgoing the interview process, candidate visits, and forums with teachers, students, and community members—despite 68% of teachers wanting a full interview process. Instead, teachers were primarily blamed for the problems within our building.
After the LSC meeting, I thought back to my yoga class from just a few hours earlier. The instructor suggested that I affirm myself for making it to my mat—contrary to my natural inclination to be self-critical, as many teachers are. Without realizing it, the instructor reminded me that Laura would have been proud of this seemingly small act I took to preserve my soul. I also knew that Laura would be proud that I was listening to the gut feeling I was having: to leave my school for a new start. In the face of so much violence where I live, and in thinking about Brianna, I knew that I needed to teach Southside Chicago students where I could be most effective.
Can I renew my belief in education by stepping away from a harsh environment?
In order to restore her faith in education, Laura cared enough about her students to temporarily walk away. She earned a Fulbright to teach English in Taiwan, a place that I view as home—as much as a home country can be to a child of immigrants. And now I was in a similar predicament: deciding if I was going to walk away from a school that I cared deeply about, where I had placed so much hope, where I began professional development initiatives as the math department chair and built student-athletes’ sense-of-self as the head boys cross country and track & field coach.
Laura had done something similar. On the surface not much came of it, but she left me another question to grapple with: Can I renew my belief in education by stepping away from a harsh environment? Can I find a new school that is at the intersection of my passions and Chicago’s greatest needs? I know I have to—for myself, but more importantly for the students I will encounter in my next chapters.
1A pseudonym
Citation
Shyu, R. (2026). Teaching, not just for the future. Kaleidoscope: Educator Voices and Perspectives, 12(2), https://knowlesteachers.org/resource/teaching-not-just-for-the-future.