She Gave Students Their Wings

ESOL Teacher In Arlington Retires

When Tae Alex Kwak arrived in Linda Tashman's class at Arlington County's Kenmore Middle School, he was an insecure 12-year-old who spoke little English and had lost his mother a year earlier.

He was not an obvious leader.

A year later, the South Korean native would ask Tashman whether he should run for class president, expressing doubts that an immigrant in the school's high-intensity language training program had any chance of getting most students to support him.

"But Ms. Tashman said, 'You can be the president if you want,' " said Kwak, now 40, remembering how he practiced his speech after school with Tashman for a month before nervously delivering it over the school's public address system.

To their surprise, he won.

It is this memory of his time in Arlington schools that Kwak holds on to -- not of how he struggled to be heard even after he won, but of the teacher who helped him.

Although summer marks an all-too-brief hiatus for many students, it is also when careers culminate for educators. Tashman is one of 63 staff members to leave Arlington schools this past school year. She spent about 30 years teaching the county's foreign-born students, and some of them and her colleagues gathered last month at Kenmore to say goodbye.

Principal John Word said Tashman was one of the first people to welcome him when he arrived at Kenmore 10 years ago. He described her as an "outstanding" teacher with the type of institutional knowledge few can match.

"We don't replace these people," Word said. "When Linda leaves, we'll get a new person, but we won't get Linda Tashman."

Word said Tashman had a way of understanding her students and knowing how to respond to them on a personal level. That kind of impact can't be measured, he said.

"She has touched a lot of lives, and over 30 years, the lives she has touched have touched others," Word said. "So her impact has had an exponential effect on the community."

Tashman, 56, whose father was an educator, began her career at 22 in New York City. She moved to Arlington a few years later in 1980, when her husband got a job in the area. She had taught students in the language program ever since.