Marga Madhuri

I attribute my success to my own passion for learning and my genuine care for seeing others succeed. As I've said, I'm a lifelong learner, and that drive to keep growing has been fundamental. But more than that, I care deeply about people, and I want to see them do better. My success leads to other people succeeding too, creating this win-win situation that I value so much. The better I am as a teacher and a person, the better my students can be, and the better their students can be. It's an ongoing chain of impact. I was also fortunate to grow up in a good neighborhood in the Detroit suburbs with access to good schools, which became my escape during difficult times at home. I got to attend the University of Michigan, which gave me a really good start. And I found good help to work through personal challenges, so a lot of dedication to self-healing has been huge in allowing me to succeed and help others.

One of the most impactful pieces of career advice I received came from a professor during my doctoral program. He told me that scholarship is what you take with you, meaning that even if you leave the university, the work you've done is your own. I hadn't really viewed it that way before, and it was really kind of impactful for me. Now I see that with this dyslexia program and the presentations I'm doing locally and even up in Northern California, that's the work I can take with me. I'm building my own sort of brand within the university. As an educator, not really an entrepreneur, stepping out into doing sideline business things and having a business model for myself is new for me, and I'm still navigating that whole thing. But understanding that my scholarship belongs to me has been transformative in how I approach my work.

I think the big thing with teaching is self-care. I've been studying natural healing alongside teaching for over 20 years, and what I love about the neurosciences is that it's finally caught up to what traditional systems have known for a long time. We can now measure brain waves and see what happens when you meditate, when you're calm, or when you're stressed. It's kind of like, no duh, the stuff we just know, but now science proves it. Teaching can be incredibly stressful, and people who go into teaching tend to be nurturing and forgiving, but that old saying, you can't give from an empty bucket, you know, put on your own air mask before helping somebody else, that's absolutely essential. Self-care practices are essential because the job could suck you dry, just like any job really, but teaching especially, because there's just so many different factors. If you're stressed and exhausted all the time, that's what gets passed down to your kids or your students. My companions and I have been doing regular movement for literally over 20 years, every single day, whether it's hiking, running, or movement with weights. Health is hugely important.

The biggest challenge in my field is just the difficulty of being a teacher. It's hard work. You're managing a lot of different kinds of kids and different kinds of personalities, and now with adults too. Our adult students, the teachers learning to teach, are struggling themselves. Typically, they're working, have children of their own, and are juggling a lot. So you want to have a rigorous program, but you also recognize these are working adults that have kids. It's about balancing how we make sure we're rigorous while also making sure they can actually do it. At La Verne, we have a lot of first-generation students on financial aid or student loans, not wealthy parents paying for them to go to school. There are a lot of demands, and if you're the first person in your family to go to college, that's also challenging because you're just learning to navigate it. That's a lot on your shoulders. On the opportunity side, by taking on training with the dyslexia program, which first required me to get my own training, it just so happened that California and actually the rest of the country is finally getting the message about dyslexia and the need to provide really specific literacy instruction to kids. So as we started doing this, the whole dyslexia world sort of opened up. We were really well poised, me personally and our program and department, in this whole dyslexia thing. It's exciting for me to have all this training and background as there's more and more need and call for trained people.

Kindness and mutual benefit are the values most important to me. I like people, I care about people, and it would be nice if we could just remember to be kind to each other. I believe in mutual benefit, meaning if I can help you and help you do better, we're all gonna win. I don't want to win just because I want to win. But if we both win from the interaction, then that's even better. It's not just about my own success, it's about creating situations where everyone benefits and succeeds together.