Love of Learning Pays Off for S.D. Teacher : Education: Mira Mesa High School instructor has won $30,000 to study Japan and plan a new curriculum in East Asian studies.

For Mira Mesa High School teacher Paul Otis, the road to Japan runs through the pages of Desiderius Erasmus and Matteo Ricci.

Say what? How do you get to East Asia with the writings of a 15th-Century Dutch Renaissance religious humanist and a 16th-Century Italian Jesuit missionary?

It’s all part of a lifelong love of learning that Otis, a veteran of 30 years in San Diego city schools classrooms, has pursued in honing his instructional skills and in stimulating two generations of students about the beauty of history and literature.

For his excitement toiling in the vineyards of academia, Otis was rewarded last week as one of only 38 teacher-scholars throughout the United States to receive $30,000 grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The 59-year-old Otis is off to Japan in June for a summer of research at Sophia University, followed by a year at UC San Diego to plan a new curriculum in East Asian studies for the San Diego Unified School District.

It’s only the latest intellectual adventure for the native Chula Vistan, described by his principal, Jim Vlassis, as “a damn good, high-powered teacher.”

Or, as one of his students, senior Nicole Elliot, put it, “He inspires you to think for yourself, to build an idea and support what you’re thinking.”

His interests span not only Japanese history and literature, and Renaissance and European writings, but music (he’s played the violin for the La Jolla Civic Symphony), the military reserve (he parachuted with Navy Seals on training missions into the Yellow Sea and Panama) and sailing, among other avocations.

Otis is a volunteer port judge for the America’s Cup, keeping track of times as the big boats round the various buoys on their offshore race course.

“But I really enjoy being around academic stuff and powering up to bring what I’ve learned back to the classroom,” Otis said between classes the other day. “And this is where I can make the biggest difference, with high school students. Maybe some kids and their parents will get turned on by the material.”

Otis first got “turned on” to Japan and Asia back in 1985, while he was spending a summer at Yale University. He had a small fellowship to study the works of Erasmus, an influential Renaissance scholar who tried to mediate between Martin Luther and the Roman Catholic Church in the tumultuous years preceding the Reformation in the early 1500s.

Otis had studied Western history as an undergraduate at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Mass., and French and English literature for his master’s at San Diego State University.

While Erasmus had nothing to do with East Asia, it was Erasmus who got Otis through the door of Yale’s Beinecke rare-book library one day during that summer fellowship. There, Otis came upon a book about Ricci, the Italian Jesuit who introduced Christian teaching to the Chinese Empire in the 16th Century and whose grave can be visited today in Beijing.

“It was a beautiful book by Jonathan Spence called ‘The Memory Palace,’ about Ricci’s experiences in China, especially to what extent the rites of the Catholic Church could be changed for Chinese culture and still be considered Christian,” Otis recalled.

“The book stuck in my mind when I got back to San Diego,” he said. “I had begun to realize that my own school was one-third students of Asian (ancestry), that the future of California was linked to the Pacific and especially Japan, yet we had no curriculum to get any information about the Pacific Rim across to students.”

Otis spent the next several years “bootstrapping” himself to acquire a basic facility in Japan and Asia, including numerous conversations with professors at UCSD who were intrigued at the persistence of “this regular high school teacher.”

By late 1989, he was emboldened enough to submit a paper to city schools Supt. Tom Payzant proposing a magnet program on the Pacific Rim to be inaugurated at Scripps Ranch High School, scheduled for opening in the fall of 1993.

A two-week fellowship to Japan in the summer of 1990 exposed Otis further to ideas about how to structure a magnet program to provide students with intellectual fodder to think about Asia, both as an academic enterprise and as a trading partner.

Now the ultimate grant of his career--a full year’s sabbatical--will allow Otis to refine many of the thoughts bouncing around in his head.

“I’ve invented, shaped and found a need for my ideas,” he said, noting the experimentation he has employed with his advanced-placement history and literature classes.

“I’ve got students today more interested in approaching contemporary military history through Vietnam than the Battle of the Bulge, and when I talk about the Reformation, I have many students who are Buddhists interested in viewing European religion from that perspective.”

Otis stresses that he is not arguing for European history to be discarded.

“But so many students think that history runs from California east to the Alamo, then on to Concord and across the Atlantic,” he said. “We need to expand the perspective of where ideas and history lie. In California today, we are right in the middle of strong historical forces.”

Otis will study the history of Tokugawa Japan, the 300-year period from the 16th to 19th centuries when Japan closed itself off to foreign influences and the era in which many Japanese cultural attributes that survive today were forged.

Otis will also explore how contemporary Japanese fiction often includes themes promoting nostalgia for the Tokugawa period, similar in Otis’ mind to how Americans today sometimes treat the Civil War.

So, in a couple of years, he can assign Japanese novels exploring what it means to be a Christian in Japan, or how the Hiroshima bombing altered a culture, in the same way he now relates a George Bernard Shaw play about Joan of Arc to contemporary Europe.

“All of this gets me hyped up,” Otis said, “to want to try and change everything, to still try and teach even better.”