Mongolia
(There Goes the Teacher)
By Stuart Grauer

A small, fine New England college asked me to mentor a beginning teacher this summer. Annie Chimgee completed her Bachelor of Arts in Education and Child Study and Psychology at Smith College in 2025. She just completed her first-year co-teaching second grade. She was in Mongolia when we first met by Zoom, visiting family after two years away. It was morning in Southern California. Late night in Ulaanbaatar.

I have been teaching for more than fifty years. When we met, Annie had been teaching for about one. I may have forgotten more about teaching and learning than someone that age has even learned, so what a way to remember those sensitive years starting out, those wide-open eyes, that innocence. So naturally, I had a lot to re-learn from her.

At some risk, I confessed the Mongolia of my imagination: long-haired horses, yurts of sheep’s wool, great drum of the grasslands rolling beyond sight. Annie was patient with me. Yes, she said, there were horses and wide plains and steppes. Even from the capital, the open country was not far away.

It had been raining there, which was good for the herds and the animals. On the outskirts of Ulaanbaatar, families still lived in gers—the round felt homes we usually call yurts—and beyond the city, nomadic life continued. But Annie herself was not going to be riding in from the steppe. She was an urban Mongolian, a US college graduate, a former varsity volleyball player, a researcher, a beginning teacher, a daughter trying to stay close to family across the sea.

She was born in Colorado. When she was eight, her family returned to Mongolia. She spoke Mongolian, but she did not yet understand everything around her. She described the experience this way: “I understood what was happening, but I also didn’t understand what was happening.”

That may be one of the best descriptions I have ever heard of what it feels like to be a child entering a new school. Let every teacher post it on their door!

In Mongolia, Annie was given a placement test. The math symbols were unfamiliar. Multiplication and division did not look the way they had looked in Colorado. She stared at the page, looked up at her father and asked, “Dad, what’s this?” The teacher quickly realized how far outside the Mongolian curriculum Annie was.

Soon afterward, Annie entered another school, a small and close-knit school, and came under the care of a teacher who, as Annie put it, “just really cared and just really wanted me to do well and improve.” At first, she was getting F’s. The teacher hung with her, day after day. Over time, Annie became an average student, then a successful one, and eventually a student who could make her way to a fine U.S. college.

Here’s the first thing Annie still remembers about that teacher: perfume. She told me that sometimes, while teaching second grade, she would catch the same scent somewhere and immediately think of her.

The scent of a fourth-grade teacher’s perfume.

My shelves are full of books about educational influence, pedagogy, curriculum and school reform. But a lot of the “real” history of education is stored in stranger places: the smell of a classroom, the sound of a teacher’s voice, the big hand that rests on a child’s desk, the adult who sees you are a bit frightened even though you think you are hiding it.

Annie remembers the perfume because she remembers being seen. Years later, today, that same child was becoming a teacher who notices. I don’t know of much more impactful to every teacher than their teacher “origin story,” which stays with us through our careers, and I don’t know a more alluring one than Annie’s, which made me think back to my own. Reader: what is yours? Is it alive?

I asked Annie what she was especially good at. She said she could pick up on small things that other people might miss. She notices friendships shifting in the classroom. She notices the dynamics between children. She notices how a child is feeling, how a mood changes, how emotions travel across the week.

I gave her a word for it, the most useful word I have ever learned about the teachers we need: Attunement.

A tuned-in teacher does not judge a class by how many children raise their hands or how smoothly the lesson plan unfolds. A tuned-in teacher scans the room like a musician listening for an instrument that has gone faint. Who has withdrawn? Who is pretending to understand? Who is restless? Who is lonely? Who is carrying something into the room that no one else can see?

Annie and I agree that attunement may be the greatest difference between a competent teacher and a great one. But the truth is that Annie was bringing the ability. I was happy enough just bringing the word. This happened several times during our conversations.

Annie described what happened after recess in her second-grade classroom. The children returned full of noise, motion and feeling. Instead of forcing them directly into another lesson, she lowered the lights. She played soft meditative music. Nature scenes appeared on the classroom flatscreen. For five minutes, children could sketch, rest their heads, drink water or use the bathroom.

The room settled. Only then did teaching resume. I told her that I had spent years trying to persuade teachers to do exactly this.

We call it: creating the conditions for learning. An older pedagogical term for it was the anticipatory set: before we teach the lesson, we prepare the learners. Again, Annie already had the practice. I had the terminology. Somehow I was deciding that giving a name to the great things I was hearing was help. The concept is metacognition: “becoming consciously aware of one's own thinking and practice. Concepts and labels give us mental models that let us organize experience, reason about it, recognize it again, and deliberately use it.” In cognitive psychology, we learn that providing the term can “turn tacit knowledge into more explicit knowledge”.[1] Now Annie can recognize the practice, talk about it with colleagues, research it, refine it, and intentionally reproduce it.

Beginning teachers are often assumed to know too little. But Annie was making live so many things many of us have spent years forgetting: Children need to move. They need music. They need intervals of quiet. They need beauty. They need to feel the room change.

They need to know that the teacher is not simply waiting to pour content into them. Annie seemed to know this all instinctively.

She had learned other things from moving between Mongolia and the United States. She told me that Mongolian children often learn independence quite young. Children walk outside, visit stores, find playgrounds and move through their communities with a freedom that has become unusual in many parts of the United States. Was she reading my blogs! But those blogs took me decades to conceive of. Annie just sensed them, like instinct.

Annie grew up surrounded by family. Her grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins lived close together in the same apartment complex. If she finds herself alone too long, she seeks somebody out. She visits a cousin. She takes a younger relative to the movies. She wants conversation, company and community.

This combination stayed with me that is among the most critical aspects of getting through high school and college: independence without isolation. I knew this combination had been with my family on both sides, generations before they emigrated, and I knew I had spent a long life searching for it. Belongingness: a core, central issue every teacher must face. In the U.S, it seems so easy to confuse independence with detachment. We call children independent when they can complete an assignment without help, sit alone at a desk or manage themselves without inconveniencing adults. But Annie reminds us that real independence grows from knowing that you belong somewhere. I was jealous—I grew up in the so-called melting pot of the U.S., my heritage so mixed I had many years of confusion about my identity. That took years of searching.

But Annie also carried Mongolia and all that heritage directly into her classroom.

She is proud of her heritage. During Lunar New Year, she showed her students how Mongolian families celebrate and how she prepared dumplings. While visiting Mongolia, she bought postcards, pictures and traditional games to bring back. She wanted her students to touch things, hold them and experience something directly—not merely look at Mongolia on a screen.

I could imagine the classroom: little hands turning over the games on tables and the floor, dumpling dough pressed between fingers, pictures of the grasslands, maybe the image of a ger standing white against an immense sky.

Annie told me about the morin khuur, the Mongolian horse-head fiddle, traditionally strung and bowed with horsehair. She said horses may respond when it is played near them.

I play old-time banjo. The notion of an instrument made partly from the animal whose spirit it carries was almost unbearably beautiful to me. The horse in the strings—they seemed to carry the music right out of the steppe. The homeland transports a whole other land through sound.

Good teachers do something like this: We create our classrooms out of the places that formed us, the people who noticed us and the injuries that taught us to notice others. Or, we create those classrooms out of the places we dream of. The forces of bureaucracy often feel so strong that they threaten to prevent us from doing all this, and the image of Annie being real like this went right to my heart. This is what I wish for every teacher.

Annie has crossed borders: from Colorado to Mongolia and back to New England. She crossed from one educational system into another. (She also crossed from athlete to non-athlete after repeated concussions forced her to leave volleyball.) She described periods of wondering who she was without the identity that had held her together.

And of course she crossed from student to teacher, so here we are. I ended up thinking that is why she seems to notice children who are trying to find their place. I hope she will never stop making these crossings. I don’t think I ever have.

Near the end of our first long conversation, Annie turned the questions toward me. “What kept you going?” she asked. She knew that I had founded a school and had remained in education even after stepping away from its daily leadership. What, she wanted to know, had kept me in it?

I told her I had never stopped trying to be a learner and a student. I had never stopped seeking mentors around the world. “People like you,” I said, “You are mentoring me.”

Then I understood probably five hours of conversations. I had been assigned to mentor Annie. I assumed knowledge would move in the usual direction, from the older teacher to the younger one. But Annie of course reminded me why I stayed.

Teaching begins with noticing. Notice the child staring at an unfamiliar symbol. Notice the energy children bring in from recess. Notice the student whose hand is never raised. Notice when the room needs music instead of another instruction. Notice when a young teacher already has the wisdom we are preparing to teach her—even if she doesn’t have all the names for it.

Annie reminded me of the essence of teaching, so easy to lose track of:  There go my students. I study them. Because, after all, I am their teacher.

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[1] Concept-metacognition, Wiley Online Library

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