A Teacher and Student, Reunited After 40 Years

For the first time since he was in her class, Bryan Murray (Puzas) (class of ‘85), and Ginny Christensen (Primary teacher ‘78-’81) sat down to catch up and relive their Plymouth days over Zoom. “Hi!” said Bryan, “I think it’s only been 40 years.” Ginny remembered Bryan as being “Such a great student, so smart, and so indomitably full of life”, said Ginny. “He was an expert in elephant jokes. He must have had 100 of them memorized!”

The first thing the two wanted to talk about was Norma, who passed away in 2019. Norma Oland (Colon) had split her time between being Ginny’s assistant teacher and teaching art in the years Ginny was at PMFS. Bryan credited Norma with introducing him to Dungeons & Dragons and Monty Python, and he called her on her 70th birthday. “I thanked her and told her all of my ‘odd’ came from her.” Ginny remembered Norma’s love for animals, especially the descented pet skunk named Odie Colon who lived under Norma’s sink at home. One time, Ginny and Norma resolved to take a class on car mechanics together. “Norma and I were both disgusted with the fact that we had cars and we didn’t know how they worked. Why should we always have to entrust them to a mechanic?” But when they showed up for the class, it turned out they would have had to leave their cars there while they took them apart over six months, and they needed their cars to get around!

Ginny and Norma’s classroom was full of animals. She and Bryan remembered Tilly the toad (but Corny the corn snake got her!), guinea pigs, a bird, and a failed worm farm. Ginny’s dog Biki also came in every day. Ginny thought kindly of Mr. Johnson the janitor, who used to like to talk to the class pets after the kids had gone home. Bryan still has a papier mache cardinal that he made in Ginny’s class, part of a year-long study of birds. 

The class also studied Africa, cooking Ghanian chicken gizzards, listening to African music, and making African masks for the Strawberry Festival. Dumisani Kumalo, the South African anti-apartheid activist and later the Permanent Representative of South Africa to the United Nations, came to visit their class and spoke to the whole school in the meetingroom. Ginny also convinced an Ashanti Prince who was part of a Penn speakers series to come in, though he said he didn’t see the point in talking to First and Second Graders. But during his visit, the students asked such good questions that he admitted he was wrong. (Questions Ginny remembers the students asking: “Do you use umbrellas?” “What pets do you have? and “What happens when there’s a disagreement between tribal leadership and the government?”) Bryan said with emphasis, “[Being in Ginny’s classroom] opened up the world to me so much.”

After attending film school at Temple University and Rochester Institute of Technology, Bryan worked in a variety of roles marketing, managing, and operating movie theaters. He now works at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is in charge of software licensing for faculty, staff and students. He never lost the movie bug, and volunteers at the Independent Film Festival Boston and always has a movie recommendation at the ready. When he took his kids Aedan, Rowan, and Rivera to visit the PMFS campus, Bryan was surprised that he could now touch the porch ceiling. 

Ginny has had a long career in education, though she says, “My happiest years of teaching were at Plymouth.” She got her Doctorate of Education along the way, and spent her life working in education in different capacities, from volunteering at a bilingual school in Guatemala, to teaching sailors at the Harry Lundeberg School of Seamanship, and serving as Head of School at Media-Providence Friends School. She recently retired but for the last 15 years ran her own consultancy, Strategy for Growth, which provided training for boards and administrators of independent schools and nonprofits. She’s always asking herself, “What’s the next interesting step?” 

“I absolutely loved Plymouth,” said Ginny. “The revolutionary social principles that I cared about, there was a theological language for it in the Quaker testimonies. I was blown away by the tenderness and intimacy of Meeting for Worship, and the amazing things the kids would say, things that would keep you thinking for months and years.” You and Norma were so inspirational to me,” said Bryan. “You’ve meant the world to me and you always will.”