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Carmen N'Namdi Educator gives kids a new way of learning
She started the school to expunge her grief. Thirty-three years ago, Carmen and George N'Namdi lost their second child, Nataki Talibah, to an accidental crib death shortly after she turned 1. At first, "We just couldn't figure out how to come up from under it," Carmen N'Namdi says. But a few years later, the couple moved from Ann Arbor to Detroit and founded the Nataki Talibah Schoolhouse near the Detroit Institute of Arts. Nataki means "of high birth," while Talibah is "seeker of knowledge" -- perfect for a school. When it opened in 1978, N'Namdi had 18 students. She had no paycheck for seven years. Today N'Namdi's schoolhouse -- she prefers that term, with its small-town connotations -- is a public charter school on Seven Mile, west of Lahser, in northwest Detroit, with 420 students from Kindergarten through eighth grade. She's now teaching the kids of some of her earliest students. The school is a social-studies immersion program, very big on language, art, history, current events and -- that rarest of virtues -- critical thinking. N'Namdi asks parents bringing their children to school to tune into National Public Radio, so the kids will arrive with issues buzzing in their heads. This is a strong-willed educator, with firm ideas about what she likes to call "the big picture." "We don't celebrate Black History Month here," she says, peering over hip glasses perched on her last quarter-inch of nose. "When you say someone was the first African American to do something, children understand white people usually do it. So why are you idolizing white people?" But she's also emphatic. "We don't do the victim thing." A play N'Namdi wrote about the Negro Baseball League for the fifth-grade production focused on the men and their ballplaying -- not their exclusion from white leagues. She wants her tidy, well-run schoolhouse to build habits that become a way of life -- empathy with others, hard thinking and a commitment to give back. For its part, Nataki Talibah has won notice, including a Good Schools award from Detroit's Skillman Foundation. And Detroit's McGregor Fund has underwritten a program to institutionalize N'Namdi's unique approach to teacher training. "There's a level of rapport between teachers and students -- and a type of inquiry going on in the classroom -- that goes well beyond what I've seen in most schools," says McGregor's president, David Campbell. Of N'Namdi herself, he just says, "She's spectacular." Michael H. Hodges
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Maggie Allesee