Lei Cooley, or 朱老师 to her students, has been helping West Morris’s Chinese program flourish since the start of it in 2012. She has been teaching all of the Chinese classes here at Mendham, and recently started teaching accounting only a year ago.
Interestingly, Ms. Cooley’s first career was not related to education. Instead, she first worked in China for air traffic control systems. Then, she went to NYU to obtain her Master of Business Administration and worked at Lucent Technologies (now Nokia) in marketing.
Ms. Cooley’s path towards education actually began with her kids. As her children were growing up, she taught them Chinese and found an interest in teaching other kids Chinese. She taught a group of kids around her neighborhood at the same time that our district started looking for a teacher to start a Chinese program.
Although this was a totally new path she was exploring, she expressed, “This is something I really enjoy. It’s very different from my previous finance and marketing job. I can actually teach someone to speak a different language, so I thought maybe that is what I should do after a little bit of time.” After Ms. Cooley submitted her application, she eventually became the district’s first Chinese teacher in 2012.
Because the Chinese program had so few classes at first, Ms. Cooley taught at both Central and Mendham. By the 3rd year, more students joined, and another teacher, Mrs. Jiang, became Central’s teacher while Ms. Cooley stayed at Mendham. The years as a Chinese teacher provided her with more insight into the English language compared to Chinese. As a native Chinese speaker, she is used to the structure of Chinese more than English, so she would often be asked about this in her first years. Ms. Cooley said, “The most interesting and challenging thing is these questions that students ask: why you speak this way, not that way, like there are all different ways of expressing something, as you know, in English.” Throughout her career, she has also appreciated students’ mindfulness of the Chinese accent and how it affects certain English pronunciations like the “th” sound. Additionally, with her degree in finance and marketing, she was able to start teaching accounting just last year, where there was a need to fill that role.
Besides learning the language, the Chinese class also included the opportunity for a field trip to China! Ms. Cooley said, “We thought that would help the Chinese program grow, because when you can bring the language learner to the country, then they will be more interested in learning it.” This proved to work, because one of her favorite parts about the field trips was seeing students have the opportunity to speak to the locals and practice general conversations in Chinese. She even recalled a former student who talked with many people on the trip and became a very good communicator in Chinese throughout his high school years and beyond.
Outside of teaching Chinese, Ms. Cooley also learns about Chinese medicinal practices. This consists of improving well-being through acupuncture, Gua Sha, and using herbal sticks. She has incorporated the practice of releasing pressure points into some Chinese classes during calming meditation to help with relieving stress.
For Ms. Cooley’s retirement, she is moving down to Savannah, Georgia, but her impact on this district and Mendham will always remain with us. Over the years, she has helped build the program as the first Chinese teacher and has given countless students valuable lessons on not only learning Chinese but also the Chinese culture and the differences in language all over the world. Thank you so much for your years of excellence and for improving the language learning experience for us. Best wishes in Savannah!
