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Class of 1958, On the Internet: Ingrid (Popa) FotinoFROM: Summit Middle SchoolIngrid Fotino, Mathematics Ph.D. Mathematics, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University; M.A., Columbia University; B.A. Barnard College; Baccalaureate (with honors) Lycee Francais de New York. Born in Romania, Dr. Fotino was raised in New York and educated in French schools. She brings to teaching the outlook of two different educational systems and a critical approach rooted in her love for philosophy, which culminated in a second place award of at the worldwide "Concours General" competition among French baccalaureate students. The six years she worked in aircraft icing research at NOAA's Wave Propagation Laboratory provide her with a rich source of real-world applications with which she likes to motivate her students. Her teaching career ranges from a stint as a teaching assistant in Romanian language classes at Harvard, to elementary math classes in New York, to calculus and applied math at the Colorado School of Mines and the Metropolitan State College of Denver. Eager for more direct contact with students, Dr. Fotino returned to secondary teaching. A year as a substitute teacher in the Boulder Valley School District convinced her that Summit was her dream school and she felt very fortunate to be asked to join its faculty in 1999. Having taught all the Summit math honors classes, she now concentrates on Proof Geometry and Algebra2/Trigonometry, working to refine the curriculum and benchmarks for these courses. Dr. Fotino received Summit's Outstanding Teacher Award in June 2002. She participates in district curriculum meetings and served on an NSF panel in Washington, D.C. ,on Teaching and Learning Centers. As co-founder of a relief organization for needy families in Romania, Dr. Fotino is active in bringing assistance to her native country. She has been featured in a Romanian Television documentary on the unacknowledged massacres she was privy to as a child prisoner in Soviet-era Yugoslavia. She and her husband, Mircea, are now "semi-native" Coloradans, as their two daughters, Domnica and Adriana, were both born and raised in Boulder. Sports, ballet, and travel are her joys outside school. *********************************************************************** January 6, 2003, Boulder Daily Camera Teacher Shares Imprisonment Story; Students learn of Fotino's flight from Romania by Amy Bounds and Elisabeth Nardi Summit Middle School math teacher Ingrid Fotino takes a break once a year from teaching calculations and turns her attention to history. She has a personal story to share with students: When she was just 8, her family undertook a harrowing journey out of Soviet-occupied Romania at the end of World War II. She tells her story to history classes to give students a firsthand account of the facts they read about in textbooks. She also wants to contradict what she sees as a cover-up of atrocities by the Soviet Union. "So little is known or understood," she said. "The Soviets killed so many people." As she talked to teacher Kyle Walpole's geography classes this year, she asked students to imagine waking up one morning to find the streets of Boulder crawling with tanks, and soldiers speaking a foreign language forcing them out of their homes. To help illustrate her story, she showed the students a video of a river her family crossed, and pictures of the place she was held prisoner and the way Romania looked the day after the Soviet Union invaded. Maps gave the students a feel for the countries her family traveled through. While fleeing Romania by boat across the Danube River, her family was captured and held in a Yugoslavian prison. She said a cup of coffee, a bowl of barley or pea soup and a sliver of bread was all they were given to eat each day. After two years in prison, her family was moved to a farm in southern Yugoslavia. "We could see the Greek mountains, and we could almost touch them," she told the students. "We could almost touch freedom." But she said they were told that if they left the farm they would be shot. She doesn't flinch from telling students about the most traumatic part of her experience — learning that a 15-year-old friend and the friend's 17-year-old brother were killed trying to get to Greece. "They took them and they shot them," she said. Her family narrowly escaped the same fate, she said. She said soldiers began allowing small groups to leave the farm and make their way to Greece. The first group, which included her friends, was taken to the border of Greece and told to go down a hill and into a valley to enter that country. But she said her family learned that the group was shot in the valley as a warning to Yugoslavian peasants considering fleeing to Greece. When her family's turn came, she said they ignored the escort's instructions to go into the valley and instead went a different direction, making it safely to Greece. She said her family's experience felt like "an amputation." "When we were in prison, no one knew we were there," she said. "There was no telephone, no mail, no visitors. We were cut off from the world. We did not exist. They could do anything they pleased to you." While reliving her experiences with students is draining, she said it's worth it to help them gain a better understanding of the atrocities of a time in history that doesn't typically receive much attention. "People in this country are sheltered from what it means to be occupied," she said. "History can be such an abstract, impersonal thing. I hope to make it more real." Students listened intently as Fotino described her time in prison and talked about friends who were killed. "It's amazing that they could cover it up, that they could cover up such torture," said eighth-grader Sam Shapiro. Classmate Chalie Simon said she was amazed by Fotino's courage. "It's great that she would tell us about this," Chalie said. "She thinks it's important enough that we know." Walpole, the history teacher, said Fotino's story adds to students understanding as they study Yugoslavia and the Iron Curtain. "It makes the students realize in a personal way what happened," Walpole said. Once free, Fotino said her family couldn't find jobs in either Greece or France, so they came to the United States. Exactly 50 years ago, she arrived in New York. Her family planned to return to Romania, but when nothing changed there they instead made their lives here. "We started our lives over," Fotino said. Out of all the bad, Fotino told the students, she also found an extraordinary amount of good in the generosity of others. She said her experiences have made her stronger. "We can each be like a light by the example we set — and our light will be imitated," she said. SOURCE: http://bcn.boulder.co.us/univ_school/summit/suprofil.shtml#fotino AND http://bcn.boulder.co.us/univ_school/summit/suin13.shtml |
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