Speaker: Tonya McQuade, English Teacher
Tonya McQuade: Hi, my name is Tonya McQuade. I'm an English teacher at Los Gatos High School. And I'm our Department Chair. I first met Venus about six years ago when I saw her speak at a Mosaic event at the Saratoga library. And I was so impressed by her poems and by her presentation that I invited her to be a speaker at our high school. And so she came and gave a presentation at one of our tutorial talks where she shared some of her poetry. The students loved it! And so we ended up inviting her back. And so I think my most memorable experience with Venus is when she came to do her Kwanzaa presentation, she also brought along a friend of hers who played the drums. She involved a lot of the students as part of the presentation. She had them up on stage with her. Some of them even got to do some drumming, which they thought was wonderful. And she taught them about Kwanzaa. She explained the various rituals that were part of it, the teachings that were part of it. She made it something that was very interesting for them, helped them to understand something that they didn't really know much about before. Um, she got them involved in marching and carrying flags and, and lots of different things. And then afterwards she ended up coming up to my classroom. And so my third period students thought they were the luckiest students on campus that day because, uh, the rest of the students only got to see her at tutorial. But she came up and she shared a couple more poems in the class and she had her friend come with the drums. And so it was a very special day. We've continued to be friends since then. We've gone to lots of poetry events. We've had her back again at our school to present some of her poems. And I'm excited about the possibility of bringing her to share her new film project as well. So, um I definitely recommend any of the projects that she's working on as something that if you're looking at an opportunity to bring her as a speaker to your classroom or to your school. I think she's great. So, I hope that you will give her some consideration. Thanks.
