Chance Is Only Part of the Lesson

Sometimes even here, in the second-largest city in the country, it can feel like a small town. Chance encounters, such as bumping into a high school sweetheart on an elevator, reinforce the notion that Los Angeles really is nothing more than the biggest suburb in the world. Jennifer Duncan and Heather Lawson learned firsthand that few of us are truly strangers.

The two sat at opposite ends of the fourth row in Gail Hobbs’ geography class at Pierce College. But only after completing an assignment requiring them to trace their family trees across time and continents did Duncan and Lawson discover they were second cousins. A family feud 30 years ago led Duncan’s grandfather, Donald Duncan, to stop speaking to his sister, Janice Duncan, Lawson’s grandmother.

Hobbs’ discovered the link as she graded papers and noticed the same name in Duncan’s and Lawson’s family trees: Maude Applegate. She was both women’s great-grandmother. Now, months after meeting for the first time, Duncan, 18, and Lawson, 20, are fast friends. A family reunion is planned for November to connect long-lost cousins.

Chance often plays a role in these connections, but Hobbs’ role cannot be overlooked. An award-winning teacher, Hobbs creates unconventional lessons for her students--asking them to pore over old documents and coax stories out of their older relatives. Those are the kinds of personal lessons that textbooks and formulaic lectures can never teach. As they explore their pasts, students form intimate connections to the places, dates and people that populate history. As Duncan and Lawson learned, open-ended learning can have surprising--and happy--results.