Well, you can start with introducing yourself.

Well, hi. I’m Cindy Tyroff. 

First thing is: how did you decide to be a teacher? 

Oh my goodness. I think I was born to be an English teacher. And like, Well, like when I was a little girl, I played, um I played school with my dolls and I would use okay, you’re in a laugh, but I didn’t have a whiteboard or anything like that, but I discovered that the inside of shoe boxes, the lids had like it was kind of this little gray paper and you could write on it with chalk. And so I would like to line up my dolls and I would have my lump chalkboard and I would teach them. And then, um then when I was older, I had friends who didn’t like to read, and that just made me so sad. And so I just got it in my head that if I had been their teacher, they would love to read. And so although it sounds a little arrogant, I was just sure. and so I thought I needed to be a teacher, you know, so, yeah, so I just wanted to be a teacher my whole life. 

That’s really cool! Then the next question is, and now you have a lot of history with other teachers at, like, this school. Can you share about your teaching journey? 

So I taught Mrs. Golando when she was in middle school, and and you know, I had taught Dr. Lawrence when he was in middle school and then, Mrs. Hall and Mrs. Schweers and Mrs. Guidry and I all worked in the North Side school district together and so Mrs. Gidry and I taught at the same school. We taught at Zachary middle school together, and then Mrs. Schweers and Mrs. Hall were high school teachers, and I taught middle school for a long time and then went to and then taught at the high school level. Then I became the district level supervisor in Northside, so I was in charge of English journalism and speech for grades six through 12. And that’s when I really probably got to know Mrs. Hall and Mrs. Schweers really well. We were also part of a writing project, so we were trainers in a writing project, and so we taught workshops for teachers on how to teach writing and we would go to conferences together and just learn together, learn from each other with each other. This is where Mrs. Schweers and I worked together at Central Office, and then and Mrs. Hall was a principal, then I left North side and Mrs. Schweers became the District level supervisor, and then later, she went back to a campus and became an administrator and a principal and so we just have been very good colleagues and friends for a long time, and so it’s nice to get to work with people who share the same kind of beliefs about education. Oh, and also I have enjoyed working with Mrs. Luckie for the past fourteen years. While I did not know her before I came to Keystone, I feel lucky to have taught her students. She is a wonderful colleague and friend. In fact, the English department members—past and current—have been wonderful collaborators. The same is true of the Keystone faculty, staff, and administration. 

And what made you decide to leave for Keystone? 

So the job that I had was a really big job and it just kept getting bigger and bigger, and North side, now don’t quote me on this, but it was like maybe the fifth largest district in the state. I don’t know, it was very large and we had lots of schools. It was a dream of mine to have that job—I worked hard to get it but it just felt like it was getting so big that I thought I was going to have to retire, you know, in about three years and another friend of mine was teaching here. Mrs. Bray, you probably didn’t know. I also hadn’t been in the classroom for about thirteen years.

I think I might have seen her name books. 

Yes, probably, because she was in Dr. Lawrence’s room. So she and I had worked together in the North Side and she then went to other districts, but we stayed good friends because of that writing project that we were all part of. And so she told me about an opening here, and I just thought I want to be back in the classroom again because for 11 years. I should tell you that that writing project was called the New Jersey writing project in Texas and then its name changed. So it’s kind of a long story, but it started in New Jersey, and then people who were part of the project came to Texas, and so they just brought it with them. So, what happens is teachers go to a three week summer workshop, but it’s all day and they learn lots of different strategies for teaching writing.

Speaking of teaching, what’s your favorite memory of teaching if you have one? 

Oh, I have so many, so many. In fact, Mrs. Hall had us to do something like that at our last department meeting talk about our favorite memories and um well, and like so just and I know these moments happen with your class too, but just the other day one of my classes was talking about actually, both of them were about Fahrenheit 451. And, you know, the level of discussion was just so high and so rich and so they were so they were all thoughtful about it and excited about it in moments like that. I just hope I never forget. 

And then, if not English, is there anything else that you would teach?

Well, I thought I was going to be a math teacher first, yes. I thought I was gonna be an English math teacher. But then I decided that math was too black and white. But I did teach journalism and I taught speech. And research, and the research class and I taught creative writing, and I taught an advanced reading class, not here, for that matter. It was fun. 

Somehow it sounds more fun than English.

Yeah, because we just read and read and read and read and read. Yeah, so I’ve loved it, but you can see they’re all kind of in the same field. 

And then Valerie asked one I liked that was interesting. If not English language, would there be another language, then you would teach

Well, the only other language that I attempted was Spanish, and I certainly didn’t get to the level to be able to teach it. I had enough hours—at one point they said if you had so many hours in a subject in the public schools that you could be asked to teach that subject. And I was just terrified because when I took Spanish in high school, we didn’t really converse. It was like we read things in a book, we conjugated verbs, we, you know, it wasn’t until my last semester of Spanish in college that I had a teacher who taught the whole class in Spanish. It’s like they told us in English how Spanish worked. And so I’m not conversant. So I had good pronunciation for a while, but I don’t even know if I have that anymore.

I just thought of this because I was having a conversation with someone, but if you were to like to pick one language to learn to read in, like Spanish would be like Don Quixote, A Thousand years of solitude, or Russian for like the Russian classics or French…

I would probably have to go with Spanish, because I love Isabella allende. I love Julia Alvarez, so that’s what I would go with, I think. 

Are there any important life events, like happy or sad, that have shaped who you are?

I’m going to say reading. Reading shape to I am. Yeah, I think I know it sounds really melodramatic to say, but I think I’ve read to learn how to live my life and so there are—like there’s I have a small collection of books in my library at home that I think are the books or some of the books that have really shaped me. 

Oh? I have that too, not as big as this (gesturing towards the shelf in her office) where one row is reserved for my favorites, like To Kill A Mockingbird and A Thousand Splendid Suns and some Dostoyevsky, though I couldn’t even tell you the plot of his books any more.

I think that’s how you get a feeling, like you have a feeling about a book and I think that that kind of carries with you. But I’ve got A Thousand Splendid Suns on my shelf. I have The Reader by Bernhard Schlink. It’s a book that was difficult to read. It’s a hurtful kind of book, but to me, it really spoke to the power of literacy, you know, because this one woman gets into just such an unfortunate situation and part of it’s because she was not literate, and I just and so I feel like that was an important book. I have When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. Oh my goodness, you should read that one. It is beautiful. The main character, he’s—I don’t know if he was a surgeon or a medical doctor—but he was really trying to figure out how to help people at the ends of their lives or how to help people cope with, you know, serious medical issues, and I think he didn’t find it in the medical world and so then he turned to literature. So then he started writing and then he ended up with a very serious illness and having to work through that. And then The Covenant of Water. Have you read that? 

No 🙁  

Oh my goodness by Abraham Verghese? Oh, that’s this epic, beautiful book set in India. It’s just… oh, I love it. And then I love Lahiri, so she’s have you ready any of her with Mrs. Hall yet? No, not yet. But you will. Okay, and then, what else is on that shelf? Oh, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, and The Gift of Asher Lev. A lot of them are about other cultures. Oh, In the Time of Butterflies. Have you read that? Oh, I loved that book. I love Julia Alvarez. So yeah, I think reading has shaped me. 

I had a question on that: I know favorite book questions are hard, but are there any, like, great books that you like reading specifically over and over again? 

Okay, I am not not a big re-reader except for the books I teach. And then I reread them over and over. And you know, I’m hoping that in retirement I’m going to reread some of these books that I love because what I know from having reread Fahrenheit 51, probably 13 times, 14 times, is that every time I read it, I see something else. You know the same thing with The Book Thief. Oh my goodness, and this summer—this past summer—the English department read All the Light we Cannot See, and that’s, oh, that’s a beautiful book you should read, and that I’d read a number of years ago, but I just loved rereading it. And so I think because there are so many books to read that, like in the precious, you know, moments, I just always want to read the next book, the next book, the next book. But maybe I would reread The Overstory. Maybe I would reread probably all of those that I mentioned to you. I think I would definitely reread When Breath Becomes Air. So, maybe that’s one of the things I’m looking forward to, is a little rereading. Do you have a book you go back to all the time?

I reread To Kill a Mockingbird for Dr. Lawrence’s class since I had already read it for fun, and I really enjoyed that. 

I’ve read that probably two or three times, but I haven’t ever had the pleasure to teach it.

The next follow-up question is, is there anything that you’ve read that’s just been so life changing that you almost don’t want to re-experience it, keeping your first one almost sacred? 

Keep the first feeling that you had?… I don’t think so. I mean, except maybe I don’t want to reread The Reader, even though I think that it was an important book for me to read because it was a painful book. I don’t know that I want to reread Schindler’s List because it also was kind of a painful book, but I don’t know that there was—I think I can kind of see that like you wanna always have that same first experience, but I think I, and I guess I could be disappointed, but I think I the book wouldn’t let me down, that I would have the same feeling again. Or maybe it would be a deeper feeling because I would be re-remembering it or re-experiencing it. So, no, sorry, I don’t. 

Yeah, for me, it’s the movie Grave of the Fireflies, which is a Studio Ghibli movie. And it’s just a really painful movie. The other one is a favorite book of mine about art, like you had a few books about reading. It’s called The Three Cornered World by Natsume Soseki.

I’m writing it down on my list. 

It’s about an artist who is discovering his art and striving for what he thinks it means. And I just decided it was really interesting and beautifully written. So if I were to learn a language, it might be Japanese just for this book. And then the other one that’s sort of sacred for me that I would reserve for special occasions is The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and Horse after seeing Mrs. Luckie has that recommendation in the library. 

So, did you read Klara and the Sun?

I did as a choice book. 

Did you like it?

I liked it. 

I thought about it because I’ve always been in search of a good science fiction book for the eighth grade summer reading, and I thought about putting that on there, but I was afraid it was not… didn’t have enough action, maybe. But then Mrs. Hall took it. 

Yeah, I had Kazuo Ishiguro for my author project last year, so I read Remains of the Day, I started The Unconsoled and then I don’t know what happened. I haven’t finished it. But it’s really, really interesting. And it’s like unlike anything, really. 

That’s good. Have you read any Octavia Butler?

(Shakes head)

Oh, I like her. She died too young, but a couple of hers are weird, but she wrote Parable of the Sower. But then there’s another one that she wrote that I really liked, but I wish that she had lived longer and could have written more books, because she’s a science fiction writer that I liked. I’m not a big science fictioner. I read Dune a couple of times. Dune’s hard. 

Oh yeah, it took forever.

Yeah. Took me forever, too. Oh, Kindred, I think, maybe was the book that I read by Octavia Butler that I really liked. It was kind of a time travel book. 

So, any quotes from those favorite books that you sort of live by, off the top of your head?

No. Nope. Well, you know what I loved about The Gift of Asher Lev by Potok? For the longest time, that was my top book because I felt like he was such a masterful writer because he was writing about Hasidic Jews and and so the protagonist is a male and is a parent and I’m not male, nor am I a parent. I have Jewish ancestry, but not Hasidic Jews. But I was crying moments before the narrator cried, you know, and I just thought, wow, what a powerful writer to evoke those emotions, you know? So anyway, but no, I don’t have any quotes. But sometimes I mark them in books, like when I go to my book club, I’ll have things like that—oh, like recently I read a book. This is Happiness. Actually, I didn’t even finish it. It was like the slowest moving book I’ve ever read in my life, Shaum. It spent like, I don’t know, 150 pages talking about how it stopped raining, you know? I mean, it was just like in this little countryside village, I don’t know, but it had a couple of little gems in it that I marked? It was like, oh, okay, but then I didn’t finish reading because I thought, I don’t know that it’s worth reading another 150 pages to find three more sentences.

Any favorite movies?

No, I hardly see movies. I can tell you two Broadway musicals that I love: Wicked and Hamilton. I mean that’s probably kind of cliché, everybody loves those two. 

And then anything that you’re just really interested in that you want to talk about? 

I love hiking. 

Really? I didn’t know that. So where what’s your favorite hikes?

Well, locally, I just love Friedrich Wilderness Park. Just right out I-10 like the La Cantera, area. Yeah. It’s just a little natural area and it’s not far from my house, so it’s a good place to just go and it’s I mean, it’s not far off interstate 10, but you feel like you’re out in the middle of nowhere, But yeah, it’s a great place to hike. And then every spring my husband and I go someplace for our anniversary and we always pick somewhere. It’s always in Texas and we pick some area where there’s a national or a state park so that we can hike and that have antique shops nearby so that he can go look at things. He’s a throwback. Yeah. And also a few Canadian parks, like Jasper and Banff. And like Lake Louise and oh my goodness, and in Oregon, crater Lake. It’s a beautiful area. And of course I did Yellowstone. but y’all didn’t get to unfortunately. And what’s the other upper school one?

Yosemite? 

Yes, Yosemite.. I went on that one too.

I’m really looking forward to seeing that. 

Oh, it’s gorgeous. 

Is there anything else you want to do once you retire? 

Oh, well, I’m just going to enjoy Sunday evenings with my husband because now Sunday evenings are always spent grading. I love reading what you guys write, it just is so hard to evaluate and put a grade on it. You know, it’s just—ah, it’s painful. So yes, Sunday evenings, I’ll enjoy them. But my husband’s been retired for a while, so I hope we travel and just, you know, get to spend more time together. I also didn’t tell you that I look forward to writing. I enjoy poetry and hope to spend many mornings on my back porch with a pen and notepad. 

And then any advice to your current and former students. 

Just keep learning. And read, read, read, read, read and write, write, write, write. Read. You know, I think when I sign yearbooks and things for people, I always put happy reading and writing always, and that’s what I would say. I am really grateful to end my career as a part of this community. You and the other students have brought me such joy. I have loved watching you all learn and grow. I will miss teaching and interacting with my students and colleagues.