May 24, 2022 • 20 mins
Educator and software engineer Thierry Mugabo Uwilingiyamana knows what the stakes are when education isn't allowed to flourish – so he's dedicated his life to spreading knowledge and giving kids the tools they need to love learning.
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
Welcome to On the Job. This season, we're focusing on
how people and businesses are getting back to work. Let's
call it a great transformation, a change in the way
workers are thinking. Employers need people to work more than ever,
putting laborers in a sort of position of power. We'll
be hearing from people navigating this new normal for themselves
as they find their life's work. On the last season
(00:32):
of On the Job, we spoke with Benny Boas, who
founded a coding company that provided coding boot camps for
anyone who wanted to become a software engineer. Well, today
we're going to talk to Magabo, an educator and a
graduate of that boot camp who's had a love for
math and numbers for as long as he can remember.
His goal is to build tools that spread education because
from personal experience, he knows how dangerous it is when
(00:55):
people don't have access to it. Well, good morning, Mr mcgabo.
How much sleep did you get last night? And you know,
much a lot more than than I I've gotten in
the last few months. My six and a half month
old sun is still learning how to sleep through the night,
(01:17):
and so it's been and up and down in the
last few months. Terry mcgabo or Lingamana goes by Mugabo.
He lives in Burlington, Vermont, and since Mugabo has a
six month old son, he knows a job to suit
his lifestyle and mess of to engineer for this moss.
As of just over a month ago, Desmos is a
(01:38):
software company that builds tools for students and teachers to
use in their curriculums. They're big thing is making their
online graphing calculators and geometry tools fun to interact with
because an arching philosophy at this moos, which I feel like.
He's a company founded by people who love math and
who are trying to create the tools and the learning
(01:59):
opportunities to help help students not only learn math, but
love learning math. Magabo is one of those people who
loves math. He sees it as a way to understand
how things in everyday life interact, the rules to how
things work. And he believes that once you understand math,
you can use it to create new ways that things
interact with each other, and then from that can emerge
(02:20):
new fields of mathematics, you know, and so it can
be a game, it can be like legos, you know,
where there's some ways that they can connect and the
ways that they can't connect. And once you understand how
they connect or don't connect, you can build amazing things
and and take them apart and build different amazing things,
you know, and so there is a magic to it.
(02:43):
So does most and the software that Mugabo is helping
to develop is trying to answer that problem, how do
we make math enjoyable, which is a big one to
take on in our society that has, for many reasons,
become very math phobic. Math phobic math generally gets a
bad rap for being too boring or too difficult, we're
(03:04):
not actually useful. At DESMOS, they make super accessible tools
online and also have a resource database for teachers anywhere
to use that has math activities on it that allows
not only teachers to adapt activities, but students to interact
with activities and then for teachers to facilitate those activities
in a classroom. And so all of that is running
on on on on software on Intennetic technologies, and as
(03:28):
a software engineer, Mugaba works from home behind the scenes,
taking in feedback from teachers and students, working with the
team on how they can improve the coding on the
tools they have and building new ones that make math
more enjoyable and understandable. One of the things that has
made me feel really good about joining this organization has
been the outpouring of love from math teachers and from
(03:51):
students talking about how learning math this way has been transformational,
has been more joyful. You know, and you don't hear
people is those where it's for learning mathematics often. So
your job is to make the magic happen. Yeah, more
or less, more or less, you know, which is pretty cool.
(04:14):
So you love math? I do? I yes, I have,
I've have um. I grew up in the household that
loved math. My dad was an engineering My mommy is
in finance and accounting, and so numbers was something that
we were at least told that we had to get,
you know, that it wasn't an option to not get it.
Mugaba was born in Kegali, the capital of Rwanda, little
(04:35):
country in Central Africa. We left one day in one
oh seven because of the because of the genocide in nineteen.
Between April and July of the truly horrific Rwandan genocide
took place. Tensions between the two main ethnic groups, the
majority Hutu and the minority Tutsi had been raging four decades,
(04:56):
and on April six, plane carrying rwanda as president was
shot down and two t extremists were blamed. That night,
the country erupted and a mass organized killing of the
minority Tutsi began. Magabo's mother was Tutsi. How how how
did I understand that as a seven year old? I
don't I don't know. And we knew that it wasn't
(05:17):
it wasn't safe, you know, you know, and I guess,
I guess that's that's all that we needed to know.
It's it's not safe out there, and and we need
to leave. Magabo and his family got out of the
country and fled to Congo. They were among two million
others that fled Rwanda, and in a few months after
Magabo left, over eight hundred thousand Tutsi were killed there.
(05:38):
He says that his parents got him out early enough
so that he didn't witness the atrocities. That's a lot
of young people younger than I, um, we're exupposed to. Yeah,
so yeah, I'm thankful for that. His family spent three
years in Congo. They had interrupted schooling because of conflicts
(05:59):
and moving around then they went to Tanzania and spent
three years there before coming to the US. So you
came to the US so when you were thirteen. I
was thirteen. Yeah, the first thirteen years of my life. Yeah.
They landed in Buffalo, where he and his five siblings
(06:20):
started to get into a regular schooling rhythm. Gobbo's trajectory
toward math and science really started to take hold right
around high school. I think I always I always wanted
to be like my dad. I I wanted to my
dads civil engineer. I wanted to do civil engineering. He
took some software engineering classes in high school and loved it,
(06:40):
so by the time he got into college at Stanford,
he knew he was going to major in some kind
of engineering. He ended up doing electrical and had a
few more classes in software engineering that really hooked him.
So that that was that That was the piece that
took me towards software engineering, and I got exposure there.
I liked it, and there were a lot of a
lot more jobs, a lot more Soto engineering jobs and
(07:01):
electrical engineering jobs, and after graduating he got a job.
I was coming home every night to burn the midnight
oil with this AI class that Stanford made available online
for anyone to take. And I was blown away by
like how well technology could deliver learning experience. And I
think that was kind of the first late pop moment
of realizing that this two can come to get any
(07:24):
very powerful ways. So he got a glimpse at how
his skills could help teach people in the future, and
a lot of his motivations came from everything he had
experienced in his past, this belief that if one of
the things that made the wander very turbulent and very
susceptible to what happened was that you had a massive
kind of youth demographic that did not have prospects, and
(07:49):
that makes them very susceptible to some Yeah, it leads
to a lot of political instability, you know. And you
and I always thought that if more people had had opportunities,
if we had the good the system of education where
people graduated with with with opportunities to take on you know,
(08:12):
to pursue their their lives, you know. And um, so
a lot of your motivation for getting into teaching was
to it's it's too to think about how I can
be part of, you know, contribute to creating a world
where what happened in the rue that doesn't happen, And
I thought I was gonna be through through through education.
(08:36):
There's a lot of pressure to put on yourself. Yeah,
well yes, and anyone know when you're young, it's okay
to kind of dream big and think. I mean, I uh,
I hadn't thought of I hadn't thought of it as
the pressure. But you know, I mean, I think the
language that i've that that that I picked up at
some point is survivors remorse. You know, the people if
(08:57):
you make it out of a tragedy like it aside,
you walk away feeling like, Okay, I survived where many
many didn't. Um what how does that then ship my
my purpose? How does that then ship how I live
my life? And and to try and also answer the
very real questions of of of why, like why me.
(09:25):
We'll be right back with Mugabo story after the break.
A strong work ethic takes pride in a job well done,
sweats over the details. This is the kind of person
you need. Express employment professionals can help. Finding the best
people requires more than sorting through applications. You need to
(09:47):
conduct a thorough surge. Express understands what it takes to
hire the right person. It takes real people, real interviews,
discovering the talents you need. We find good people matching
their skills with the right jobs. At Express, we find
people for jobs and companies of all sizes and industries,
(10:10):
from the production floor to the front office. Sometimes finding
the best new employee really is about who you know
Express nose jobs. Get to know Express, go to Express
pros dot com to find a location near you. Back
to Mogabo, he'd become a software engineer, and now he
(10:33):
saw the huge potential his skills had to be a
tool for education, because again he believed that if there
were better education in Rwanda, the country maybe wouldn't have
been so vulnerable to dangerous rhetoric, and maybe the genocide
wouldn't have happened. It's nice to have a powerful drive,
a powerful motivating sense of purpose, you know. So he
(10:55):
had been exposed to this online class from Stanford and
he was blown away by how well built the software
for the class was. So this Jove is actually getting
into teaching. It put education on the map for me
as something that I wanted to do. I wasn't sure
in what, how, in what capacity because I was headed
towards engineering, and I think that was kind of the
(11:17):
first late pop moment of realizing that this two can
come to get any very powerful ways. It was two
thousand nine by the time Mugabo graduated college. The recession
had just so it was hard to find a job
in teaching or find a job at all at the time.
He stuck with engineering and worked as a software consultant
(11:37):
for the I R S. He was taking more online courses,
you got his n b A. He even started working
at an education technology company. I think it was the
years in social engineering that kind of made me appreciate
the human element that yes, technology can facilitate great learning experiences.
And it worked for me. But when we're talking about
where kids are in the company classrooms, having a piste
(12:00):
of technology is not It's nowhere near enough. So when
I had the opportunity to go into the classroom, I
did because I wanted to spend some time on the
other side of not creating the tools, by using the
tools in the classroom, and that was a whole learning experience. Um,
that was a whole learning experience. Mugabo got a job
(12:21):
in the w new Ski School district of Vermont. He
was teaching middle and high school kids ages eleven to
nineteen Utah engineering and science, and by all accounts and
students loved them. I leaned on exploring. I leaned on
following the interests and the kind of the whims of
the students, like world where the questions coming from, and
kind of you know, And I always leaned on fun.
(12:44):
I mean, all learners learned differently, you know, and and
and there was a whole lot there that I needed
to learn and then I needed to figure out. He
was a very interactive, experience teacher, always experimenting using technology
and legos, and he tried to run a classrooms very democratically,
like an open forum where people expressed themselves freely, and
(13:05):
you know, sometimes with disagreements. Kids felt very free and
very free too to check me and and and to
to freely express themselves in ways that you know, like
if I'm angry and I'm raising my voice, I'm not
being rude, you know, I'm just angry and I'm raising
my voice and you know, and it's like it's okay.
Mugabo played a very important role at his school. For context,
(13:29):
Vermont is like white, very white, but a lot of
the immigrants and refugees who have come to Vermont has
settled up in Winowski and nearby Burlington. And you know,
my my class, my school was like a majority black
and brown kids. That is very exceptional for Vermont, very right. Yeah, Now,
(13:52):
the teaching staff and the administration was still like almost
entirely white. He was actually the only black teacher in
the middle school in high school, and he felt a
responsibility to advocate for more diverse multicultural space because while
they had students from all over the world, they were
still learning in a structurally white American environment. And I
(14:15):
found that the impact that that had on my young
kids was the message that the ways of being were
not okay, that they were the ways of being were
not This was not the place to express yourself as
you are. You need to learn a new way of
being um And that for for young malleable minds, that
(14:36):
has a way of kind of teaching them to reject
who they are and then to try and figure out
what who they're supposed to be. But he says it
was always an uphill battle. The school preached its messages
of being a multicultural space, but wasn't really ever acting
on it. Mogabo spent a lot of time advocating for
his students to make those changes for a better system,
(14:58):
for more diverse faculty, but he says time and time
again he wasn't really supported by the school. UM. Ultimately,
I I left. You know, it was kind of burning
out that I didn't on community organizing was just not
visible and I was becoming a dad and so so
(15:20):
I I left. I left so you know, to to
be able to be able to also fulfill my responsibility
as a husband as and as a dad. Mugabo left
the school last year in he had a baby on
the way and he says being an educator and an
activist within the school he worked in was taking so
much of himself. I realized that UM, a lot of
(15:45):
the change it needs to happen. Can you know the
community needs to spearhead that the parents need to be
organized enough to realize what's happening to their kids. You
know what they are and aren't getting um and then
demanded he wrote an open letter to the school giving
specific examples of how the faculty and community can actually
(16:06):
be more diverse. In it, he said, I have done
my part to make good trouble at w Newski. I've
spoken the truth even when it was hard. These are
very actionable steps. Which of these will you take lead
on to make sure it is implemented. I think that's
absolutely more sustainable that we have more engaged, more parents
(16:26):
who understand what's happening, to understand the system, understand how
to advocate for themselves, and working in collaboration with whoever
is willing to work with them to make sure that
their kids care what they need. Did you feel bad
leaving at all? Yeah? Yeah, it remains hard. I mean
every time I see my students, um um, I feel
(16:50):
like I part of the reason why I made my
resignation leaders public was too you know, was understanding that
I had and responsibility to the community to kind of
explain what happened and and and why I felt that
I um, I couldn't stay. In the letter, he also
(17:12):
says that he plans to get back to community organizing
when he can. He told me he probably won't feel
totally better about the situation until he finds the time
to do that. But it's nice that I'm able to
be there for my for my son and my wife.
I mean, I would not have been able to do
that and so so there is that and um and
that counts for that counts for a lot. So he's
(17:35):
still working through a lot, but now he has the
autonomy and the time to do it. Teaching and trying
to change the way people learned in the school was
draining him. Now that he's building educational software with DESMOS,
he can be there for his family and still be
a part of spreading knowledge as he always intended. Seeing
what they've done here gives me a lot of hope.
(17:55):
We're not trying to do everything. We don't have to.
We understand that I'll play is to create this powerful
kind of a little tool that's gonna be one of
many tools that eight people educating all over the world
I'm going to use. And if we make it easy
enough and intuitive enough and fun enough and enjoyable enough,
you know, then this teachers are going to do magic
(18:18):
with it. Um And they do. Mugabo saw a lack
of cultural understanding in his school, and he fought tooth
and nail to change it because he knows firsthand how
dangerous that lack of understanding can be. I think a
lot of people who are driven by some kind of
(18:40):
higher purpose, like that can forget to take care of
themselves in the process, to think that we need to
be the solution instead of being a part of it.
To me, it's really inspiring what mcgabo has done all
of it. But one of the most admirable things I
think is that he knew when to step away, and
he knew he couldn't do it alone. Yeah, he had
(19:01):
real purpose to fight for, but he also had a family,
and he also had his well being, and he realized
that he couldn't adequately take care of anyone if he
didn't take care of himself first. Today he found a
job that lets him do that and still allows him
to be a part of making that magic happen. He
knows he can't do everything and understands that he is
(19:21):
just a powerful little force, one of many that are
all needed to help people learn. As the world changes
and all of our lives become more complicated, I think
we can all take some pointers from Ogabo, because there's
gonna be a lot more jobs like that, jobs where
we can take better care of ourselves and still do
the work that matters to us. I don't know this
(19:42):
compulsion that you have to be an educator I'm sure
you got to really scratch that itch by seeing people
face to face every day, is what you're doing right now?
Is it still fulfilling that specific need for you? Yes,
it still feels like I'm part of a team that's
contributing to something that I very deeply care about and
(20:04):
that I I think is very important. And I can
do that with the autonomy of being a software engineer
and God willing with the autonomy that's going to allow
me to do more things once, you know, we find
a rhythm with a family life. Yeah, so it's a
good place. It's a good place to be now. For
(20:27):
on the job, I'm Modiscray
Welcome to On the Job. This season, we're focusing on
how people and businesses are getting back to work. Let's
call it a great transformation, a change in the way
workers are thinking. Employers need people to work more than ever,
putting laborers in a sort of position of power. We'll
be hearing from people navigating this new normal for themselves
as they find their life's work. On the last season
(00:32):
of On the Job, we spoke with Benny Boas, who
founded a coding company that provided coding boot camps for
anyone who wanted to become a software engineer. Well, today
we're going to talk to Magabo, an educator and a
graduate of that boot camp who's had a love for
math and numbers for as long as he can remember.
His goal is to build tools that spread education because
from personal experience, he knows how dangerous it is when
(00:55):
people don't have access to it. Well, good morning, Mr mcgabo.
How much sleep did you get last night? And you know,
much a lot more than than I I've gotten in
the last few months. My six and a half month
old sun is still learning how to sleep through the night,
(01:17):
and so it's been and up and down in the
last few months. Terry mcgabo or Lingamana goes by Mugabo.
He lives in Burlington, Vermont, and since Mugabo has a
six month old son, he knows a job to suit
his lifestyle and mess of to engineer for this moss.
As of just over a month ago, Desmos is a
(01:38):
software company that builds tools for students and teachers to
use in their curriculums. They're big thing is making their
online graphing calculators and geometry tools fun to interact with
because an arching philosophy at this moos, which I feel like.
He's a company founded by people who love math and
who are trying to create the tools and the learning
(01:59):
opportunities to help help students not only learn math, but
love learning math. Magabo is one of those people who
loves math. He sees it as a way to understand
how things in everyday life interact, the rules to how
things work. And he believes that once you understand math,
you can use it to create new ways that things
interact with each other, and then from that can emerge
(02:20):
new fields of mathematics, you know, and so it can
be a game, it can be like legos, you know,
where there's some ways that they can connect and the
ways that they can't connect. And once you understand how
they connect or don't connect, you can build amazing things
and and take them apart and build different amazing things,
you know, and so there is a magic to it.
(02:43):
So does most and the software that Mugabo is helping
to develop is trying to answer that problem, how do
we make math enjoyable, which is a big one to
take on in our society that has, for many reasons,
become very math phobic. Math phobic math generally gets a
bad rap for being too boring or too difficult, we're
(03:04):
not actually useful. At DESMOS, they make super accessible tools
online and also have a resource database for teachers anywhere
to use that has math activities on it that allows
not only teachers to adapt activities, but students to interact
with activities and then for teachers to facilitate those activities
in a classroom. And so all of that is running
on on on on software on Intennetic technologies, and as
(03:28):
a software engineer, Mugaba works from home behind the scenes,
taking in feedback from teachers and students, working with the
team on how they can improve the coding on the
tools they have and building new ones that make math
more enjoyable and understandable. One of the things that has
made me feel really good about joining this organization has
been the outpouring of love from math teachers and from
(03:51):
students talking about how learning math this way has been transformational,
has been more joyful. You know, and you don't hear
people is those where it's for learning mathematics often. So
your job is to make the magic happen. Yeah, more
or less, more or less, you know, which is pretty cool.
(04:14):
So you love math? I do? I yes, I have,
I've have um. I grew up in the household that
loved math. My dad was an engineering My mommy is
in finance and accounting, and so numbers was something that
we were at least told that we had to get,
you know, that it wasn't an option to not get it.
Mugaba was born in Kegali, the capital of Rwanda, little
(04:35):
country in Central Africa. We left one day in one
oh seven because of the because of the genocide in nineteen.
Between April and July of the truly horrific Rwandan genocide
took place. Tensions between the two main ethnic groups, the
majority Hutu and the minority Tutsi had been raging four decades,
(04:56):
and on April six, plane carrying rwanda as president was
shot down and two t extremists were blamed. That night,
the country erupted and a mass organized killing of the
minority Tutsi began. Magabo's mother was Tutsi. How how how
did I understand that as a seven year old? I
don't I don't know. And we knew that it wasn't
(05:17):
it wasn't safe, you know, you know, and I guess,
I guess that's that's all that we needed to know.
It's it's not safe out there, and and we need
to leave. Magabo and his family got out of the
country and fled to Congo. They were among two million
others that fled Rwanda, and in a few months after
Magabo left, over eight hundred thousand Tutsi were killed there.
(05:38):
He says that his parents got him out early enough
so that he didn't witness the atrocities. That's a lot
of young people younger than I, um, we're exupposed to. Yeah,
so yeah, I'm thankful for that. His family spent three
years in Congo. They had interrupted schooling because of conflicts
(05:59):
and moving around then they went to Tanzania and spent
three years there before coming to the US. So you
came to the US so when you were thirteen. I
was thirteen. Yeah, the first thirteen years of my life. Yeah.
They landed in Buffalo, where he and his five siblings
(06:20):
started to get into a regular schooling rhythm. Gobbo's trajectory
toward math and science really started to take hold right
around high school. I think I always I always wanted
to be like my dad. I I wanted to my
dads civil engineer. I wanted to do civil engineering. He
took some software engineering classes in high school and loved it,
(06:40):
so by the time he got into college at Stanford,
he knew he was going to major in some kind
of engineering. He ended up doing electrical and had a
few more classes in software engineering that really hooked him.
So that that was that That was the piece that
took me towards software engineering, and I got exposure there.
I liked it, and there were a lot of a
lot more jobs, a lot more Soto engineering jobs and
(07:01):
electrical engineering jobs, and after graduating he got a job.
I was coming home every night to burn the midnight
oil with this AI class that Stanford made available online
for anyone to take. And I was blown away by
like how well technology could deliver learning experience. And I
think that was kind of the first late pop moment
of realizing that this two can come to get any
(07:24):
very powerful ways. So he got a glimpse at how
his skills could help teach people in the future, and
a lot of his motivations came from everything he had
experienced in his past, this belief that if one of
the things that made the wander very turbulent and very
susceptible to what happened was that you had a massive
kind of youth demographic that did not have prospects, and
(07:49):
that makes them very susceptible to some Yeah, it leads
to a lot of political instability, you know. And you
and I always thought that if more people had had opportunities,
if we had the good the system of education where
people graduated with with with opportunities to take on you know,
(08:12):
to pursue their their lives, you know. And um, so
a lot of your motivation for getting into teaching was
to it's it's too to think about how I can
be part of, you know, contribute to creating a world
where what happened in the rue that doesn't happen, And
I thought I was gonna be through through through education.
(08:36):
There's a lot of pressure to put on yourself. Yeah,
well yes, and anyone know when you're young, it's okay
to kind of dream big and think. I mean, I uh,
I hadn't thought of I hadn't thought of it as
the pressure. But you know, I mean, I think the
language that i've that that that I picked up at
some point is survivors remorse. You know, the people if
(08:57):
you make it out of a tragedy like it aside,
you walk away feeling like, Okay, I survived where many
many didn't. Um what how does that then ship my
my purpose? How does that then ship how I live
my life? And and to try and also answer the
very real questions of of of why, like why me.
(09:25):
We'll be right back with Mugabo story after the break.
A strong work ethic takes pride in a job well done,
sweats over the details. This is the kind of person
you need. Express employment professionals can help. Finding the best
people requires more than sorting through applications. You need to
(09:47):
conduct a thorough surge. Express understands what it takes to
hire the right person. It takes real people, real interviews,
discovering the talents you need. We find good people matching
their skills with the right jobs. At Express, we find
people for jobs and companies of all sizes and industries,
(10:10):
from the production floor to the front office. Sometimes finding
the best new employee really is about who you know
Express nose jobs. Get to know Express, go to Express
pros dot com to find a location near you. Back
to Mogabo, he'd become a software engineer, and now he
(10:33):
saw the huge potential his skills had to be a
tool for education, because again he believed that if there
were better education in Rwanda, the country maybe wouldn't have
been so vulnerable to dangerous rhetoric, and maybe the genocide
wouldn't have happened. It's nice to have a powerful drive,
a powerful motivating sense of purpose, you know. So he
(10:55):
had been exposed to this online class from Stanford and
he was blown away by how well built the software
for the class was. So this Jove is actually getting
into teaching. It put education on the map for me
as something that I wanted to do. I wasn't sure
in what, how, in what capacity because I was headed
towards engineering, and I think that was kind of the
(11:17):
first late pop moment of realizing that this two can
come to get any very powerful ways. It was two
thousand nine by the time Mugabo graduated college. The recession
had just so it was hard to find a job
in teaching or find a job at all at the time.
He stuck with engineering and worked as a software consultant
(11:37):
for the I R S. He was taking more online courses,
you got his n b A. He even started working
at an education technology company. I think it was the
years in social engineering that kind of made me appreciate
the human element that yes, technology can facilitate great learning experiences.
And it worked for me. But when we're talking about
where kids are in the company classrooms, having a piste
(12:00):
of technology is not It's nowhere near enough. So when
I had the opportunity to go into the classroom, I
did because I wanted to spend some time on the
other side of not creating the tools, by using the
tools in the classroom, and that was a whole learning experience. Um,
that was a whole learning experience. Mugabo got a job
(12:21):
in the w new Ski School district of Vermont. He
was teaching middle and high school kids ages eleven to
nineteen Utah engineering and science, and by all accounts and
students loved them. I leaned on exploring. I leaned on
following the interests and the kind of the whims of
the students, like world where the questions coming from, and
kind of you know, And I always leaned on fun.
(12:44):
I mean, all learners learned differently, you know, and and
and there was a whole lot there that I needed
to learn and then I needed to figure out. He
was a very interactive, experience teacher, always experimenting using technology
and legos, and he tried to run a classrooms very democratically,
like an open forum where people expressed themselves freely, and
(13:05):
you know, sometimes with disagreements. Kids felt very free and
very free too to check me and and and to
to freely express themselves in ways that you know, like
if I'm angry and I'm raising my voice, I'm not
being rude, you know, I'm just angry and I'm raising
my voice and you know, and it's like it's okay.
Mugabo played a very important role at his school. For context,
(13:29):
Vermont is like white, very white, but a lot of
the immigrants and refugees who have come to Vermont has
settled up in Winowski and nearby Burlington. And you know,
my my class, my school was like a majority black
and brown kids. That is very exceptional for Vermont, very right. Yeah, Now,
(13:52):
the teaching staff and the administration was still like almost
entirely white. He was actually the only black teacher in
the middle school in high school, and he felt a
responsibility to advocate for more diverse multicultural space because while
they had students from all over the world, they were
still learning in a structurally white American environment. And I
(14:15):
found that the impact that that had on my young
kids was the message that the ways of being were
not okay, that they were the ways of being were
not This was not the place to express yourself as
you are. You need to learn a new way of
being um And that for for young malleable minds, that
(14:36):
has a way of kind of teaching them to reject
who they are and then to try and figure out
what who they're supposed to be. But he says it
was always an uphill battle. The school preached its messages
of being a multicultural space, but wasn't really ever acting
on it. Mogabo spent a lot of time advocating for
his students to make those changes for a better system,
(14:58):
for more diverse faculty, but he says time and time
again he wasn't really supported by the school. UM. Ultimately,
I I left. You know, it was kind of burning
out that I didn't on community organizing was just not
visible and I was becoming a dad and so so
(15:20):
I I left. I left so you know, to to
be able to be able to also fulfill my responsibility
as a husband as and as a dad. Mugabo left
the school last year in he had a baby on
the way and he says being an educator and an
activist within the school he worked in was taking so
much of himself. I realized that UM, a lot of
(15:45):
the change it needs to happen. Can you know the
community needs to spearhead that the parents need to be
organized enough to realize what's happening to their kids. You
know what they are and aren't getting um and then
demanded he wrote an open letter to the school giving
specific examples of how the faculty and community can actually
(16:06):
be more diverse. In it, he said, I have done
my part to make good trouble at w Newski. I've
spoken the truth even when it was hard. These are
very actionable steps. Which of these will you take lead
on to make sure it is implemented. I think that's
absolutely more sustainable that we have more engaged, more parents
(16:26):
who understand what's happening, to understand the system, understand how
to advocate for themselves, and working in collaboration with whoever
is willing to work with them to make sure that
their kids care what they need. Did you feel bad
leaving at all? Yeah? Yeah, it remains hard. I mean
every time I see my students, um um, I feel
(16:50):
like I part of the reason why I made my
resignation leaders public was too you know, was understanding that
I had and responsibility to the community to kind of
explain what happened and and and why I felt that
I um, I couldn't stay. In the letter, he also
(17:12):
says that he plans to get back to community organizing
when he can. He told me he probably won't feel
totally better about the situation until he finds the time
to do that. But it's nice that I'm able to
be there for my for my son and my wife.
I mean, I would not have been able to do
that and so so there is that and um and
that counts for that counts for a lot. So he's
(17:35):
still working through a lot, but now he has the
autonomy and the time to do it. Teaching and trying
to change the way people learned in the school was
draining him. Now that he's building educational software with DESMOS,
he can be there for his family and still be
a part of spreading knowledge as he always intended. Seeing
what they've done here gives me a lot of hope.
(17:55):
We're not trying to do everything. We don't have to.
We understand that I'll play is to create this powerful
kind of a little tool that's gonna be one of
many tools that eight people educating all over the world
I'm going to use. And if we make it easy
enough and intuitive enough and fun enough and enjoyable enough,
you know, then this teachers are going to do magic
(18:18):
with it. Um And they do. Mugabo saw a lack
of cultural understanding in his school, and he fought tooth
and nail to change it because he knows firsthand how
dangerous that lack of understanding can be. I think a
lot of people who are driven by some kind of
(18:40):
higher purpose, like that can forget to take care of
themselves in the process, to think that we need to
be the solution instead of being a part of it.
To me, it's really inspiring what mcgabo has done all
of it. But one of the most admirable things I
think is that he knew when to step away, and
he knew he couldn't do it alone. Yeah, he had
(19:01):
real purpose to fight for, but he also had a family,
and he also had his well being, and he realized
that he couldn't adequately take care of anyone if he
didn't take care of himself first. Today he found a
job that lets him do that and still allows him
to be a part of making that magic happen. He
knows he can't do everything and understands that he is
(19:21):
just a powerful little force, one of many that are
all needed to help people learn. As the world changes
and all of our lives become more complicated, I think
we can all take some pointers from Ogabo, because there's
gonna be a lot more jobs like that, jobs where
we can take better care of ourselves and still do
the work that matters to us. I don't know this
(19:42):
compulsion that you have to be an educator I'm sure
you got to really scratch that itch by seeing people
face to face every day, is what you're doing right now?
Is it still fulfilling that specific need for you? Yes,
it still feels like I'm part of a team that's
contributing to something that I very deeply care about and
(20:04):
that I I think is very important. And I can
do that with the autonomy of being a software engineer
and God willing with the autonomy that's going to allow
me to do more things once, you know, we find
a rhythm with a family life. Yeah, so it's a
good place. It's a good place to be now. For
(20:27):
on the job, I'm Modiscray
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