Like the famous role in Mr. Holland’s Opus, teaching for me was often an afterthought. On one hand, living as a welfare child in the slums of Roxbury, the Judaic teachers at Maimonides School in Boston during the ’40s and ’50s were both my heroes and my saviors from an otherwise humdrum life. But so were the literary and mythic figures from classic literature that captured my imagination. So, as my graduation drew near, being a teacher was too ordinary a profession for a dreamy, somewhat introverted Jewish girl. But, as the saying goes, A mentch tracht un Gott lacht, or its contemporary counterpart, “Life happens when you’re making other plans.”