Lee Cataluna: Former Kaimuki Intermediate students reunite with inspirational teacher

In 1968, Betsy Tama­naha was 24 years old, a recent University of Hawaii graduate in her second year of teaching, staring down a class of smart, potentially restless seventh graders.

“I knew I had to do something to intimidate them,” Tamanaha said with a gleam in her eye. So she made her students do speed tests on math facts, giving them more information than they could handle in the five minutes allotted and sometimes secretly shaving off a few seconds to make it extra exciting.

“Later they would say, ‘Oh, Mrs. Tamanaha, you challenged us!’ But no, that wasn’t it!”

“She wanted us to be teachable,” Lori Hashizuma said.

Hashizuma was Tama­naha’s student that year, and one project from that class stayed with her for the last 50 years. It was another activity Tama­naha dreamed up to keep her bright students interested and productive.

The directions were simple: Come up with a creative project that utilizes math. There were no parameters. The kids could dream up anything. Many of the boys came in with mazes they had built out of wood or cardboard. Hashizuma and three of her friends came in with an entire world.

Monna Koyonagi, Debbie Kutara, Mimorie Acain and Hashizuma invented a futuristic society they called “Mondeblor in the planet of Mims,” a fanciful title that was a combination of their first names. They used geometric shapes to design their city and create wardrobe pieces for their citizens, and described the way their imagined community lived and worked in peace and plenty.

It was space-race inspired, a STEAM project decades before anyone heard of STEAM, all created in an upstairs classroom of an old termite-eaten wooden building at Kaimuki Intermediate. Their finished project, a slim hand-­written document written in the careful cursive of earnest middle-school girls, existed in only one copy because, back then, there was no easy way to make duplicates.

Hashizuma kept that copy. She graduated from Kalani High School, got her undergraduate degree in economics from the University of Hawaii and then her master’s in applied economics at the University of Michigan.

Though she moved to Washington, D.C., and New York City for her career before settling down in Connecticut, she always knew where that red folder was.

“In the top drawer of my desk with the medical information and the car files and the coupons from Bed Bath & Beyond,” she said. “I just wanted to remember that time and her. I really loved math. Every day she was so enthusiastic.”

This reunion of teacher and students began as so many reunions do these days. Hashizuma noticed a photo on Facebook of the old Kaimuki Intermediate School.

Some of the alumni were posting memories of different teachers. Hashizuma posted a memory of Mrs. Tama­naha. Tamanaha saw the post and the two connected and started communicating. Hashizuma had plans to visit Hawaii and they decided to meet for lunch. She brought the Mondeblor project folder and invited her classmates.

Kutara, who handles licensing at the University of Hawaii, remembered the class as a congenial group of kids all trying to get good grades.

“It was a personal kind of motivation, not from parental pressures,” she said.

Koyonagi is a retired attorney. Nora Wakayama Garrod didn’t work on the Mondeblor project but was in their classmate and friend. The women are still hoping to reach Acain, who they remember as an avid reader who always did well on the speed tests and who might have been the one who came up with the futuristic utopia idea in the first place.

As for Tamanaha, she still keeps in touch with her own high school math teacher, now in his 80s, who inspired her to be the kind of teacher who challenged kids to dream.

Tamanaha looked over the project folder from all those years ago when girls imagined a bright, abundant, math-filled future. “Gee, I could have written some compliments on this or something. Like, ‘Good job.’ I’m sorry about that,” she said, then shrugged. “Oh, well. It wasn’t for a grade.”

Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.